Leo Strauss /

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a political philosopher who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books. Originally trained in the Neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and later acquainted with phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, and encouraged application of their ideas on contemporary political theory. Leo Strauss was born in the small town of Kirchhain in Hesse-Nassau, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia (part of the German Empire), on September 20, 1899, to Hugo Strauss and Jennie Strauss, née David. According to Allan Bloom's 1974 obituary in Political Theory, Strauss "was raised as an Orthodox Jew," but the family does not appear to have completely embraced Orthodox practice. In "A Giving of Accounts", published in The College 22 (1) and later reprinted in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of