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Strauss Read from France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
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Leo Strauss has long had a “scholarly” presence among French orientalists and medievalists, thanks to his fundamentally important works on the falasifa and Maimonides, two of which were published in France in the 1930's. To French political “thinkers,” caught as they were for so long, like Laocoon, in the serpentine toils of Stalinism, Maoism and other variants of “Marxism,” including its decadently ironic postmodern negations, Strauss seems to have been a largely unknown name. Some interpreters of the history of modern political philosophy have, of course, taken note of his analyses of Machiavelli, for example, and the French translation of Natural Right and History was in fact first published in 1954.
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References
1. In addition to Natural Right and History and On Tyranny (1954)Google Scholar the following works by Strauss have been published in French translation: Pensées sur Machiavel (1982)Google Scholar; La Cité et l'homme (1987)Google Scholar; Maimonide (1988)Google Scholar; and La Persécution et l'art d'écrire (1989)Google Scholar. The most complete synthesis of Strauss's works and their interpreters is provided by an American expatriate Marshall, Terence, “Leo Strauss, la philosophic et la science politique,” Revue francaise de science politique 35 (1985): 605–638 and 801–839CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ferry, Luc, Philosophic politique 1. Le Droit: la nouvelle querelle des Anciens et les Modernes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984) [Google ScholarEnglish translation, Political Philosophy, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Part One], ties together the Heideggerian and the Straussian critiques of modernity.Google Scholar
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As far as I know, no one has commented on Strauss's interpretations of Mendelssohn.
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