One of the most controversial thinkers of modern times, Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a German Jew, was a Socratic political philosopher. As he considered the civic duty of a Socratic to be to question and criticize reigning dogmas, he aroused bitter opposition from established academic and intellectual authorities.

Leo Strauss was born to a rural, orthodox family living in the village of Kirchhain in the province of Hesse, Germany, on September 20, 1899. He graduated from the Gymnasium Philippinum in Marburg in 1917 and served until the end of World War I in the German army of occupation in Belgium. With war's end, Strauss entered upon the study of mathematics, natural science, and, above all, philosophy at the Universities of Marburg, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Hamburg. In 1921 he received his doctorate from Hamburg, with a dissertation on the theory of knowledge of Friedrich Jacobi, written under the supervision of the neo-Kantian...