A Strauss of Cards

Gunther Heilbrunn reviews Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, by Arthur M. Melzer, and the teaching and influence of Leo Strauss, at The National Interest.

"As it happens, my own interest in the matter is quite personal. From 1953 until I left for the University of Heidelberg in 1958, I attended Strauss’s biweekly lectures at the University of Chicago’s Harper Hall off the Midway. I date my intellectual awakening to the day I first heard Mr. Strauss, as his students always called him, put to rest the specter of historicism. His renewal of the eighteenth-century quarrel of the ancients and moderns (spoofed in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books) on behalf of the ancients was spellbinding."