January 1, 2026
Conservatives are winning in America on multiple fronts. New centers of civic education and Great Books at both public and private institutions of higher learning are challenging longstanding progressive and identitarian domination of universities. As with most rising coalitions, the current conservative formation’s victories have exposed some of its deeper tensions and disagreements. In academia, this is especially clear when it comes to questions about the status of the Straussians.
The Straussians, named after their intellectual forefather Leo Strauss, have been blamed for a lot over the years. A conspiracy theory put the Iraq War at their feet. This was even less plausible than the allegation that deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida were responsible for woke-era fervor over, say, microaggressions. However, a common defense, that Straussianism is just a way of reading old books, doesn’t hold up to contact with at least some actually existing Straussians, either. As I have often heard it explained and seen it practiced, Straussianism is, in fact, a kind of wholesale orientation toward intellectual life, and, as embodied by this subgroup of adherents, it is at best misguided and at worst incoherent. Here I argue that this version of Straussianism is insufficient for philosophical education; that its tactics look ultimately circular; and that it places the student in an unstable position of simultaneous dogmatic self-confidence and dogmatic obedience to “Great” writers.
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The Straussian approach is often thought of as being limited to “esotericism.” Esotericism is an approach to reading which looks for secret messages from the author. Why look for or expect secret messages? A few rationales are given. The reader might learn more by working something out for themselves rather than simply being told straightforwardly. There might be a danger to society in telling the truth to all readers, necessitating some sort of “noble lie”. Or – and I think this is the most characteristic idea – telling the truth might put the writer themselves, typically a philosopher, in danger. On the other hand, philosophers still want to transmit their most important views and findings. So they must do so by “writing between the lines”. This is linked to a core orientation of Straussianism: towards thinking of political philosophy as central to philosophy and towards thinking of the politics of philosophy, how philosophy itself has political interests, as central to political philosophy.
Many expositions and defenses of Straussianism are therefore expositions and defenses of esotericism. However, esotericism alone is not my target here. It is plausible that we sometimes speak and write esoterically. If a date mentions her cute dog and I ask whether I can meet the beast, it’s obvious that I am also asking for something else. If I am up for tenure and also reviewing a mediocre book by someone on my committee, I might present its flaws as opportunities for further thinking and its limited virtues as moments of genuine brilliance. If I am worried about being fired for being insufficiently woke, or on the other hand insufficiently pro-Trump or pro-America, I might hide some of my beliefs, possibly obscuring them entirely but perhaps instead requiring the reader to produce a little bit of reasoning themselves in order to infer that I hold them.
It’s also true that many so-called Great Books were written under circumstances of political difficulty. This is part of what makes the Great Books tradition such a comfort and inspiration. Straussians often emphasize that Plato probably had the execution of Socrates in mind when he thought about how to communicate his ideas. Who could blame them for considering that possibility? Seneca was the teacher of Nero, who ended up ordering him to commit suicide. Boethius wrote On the Consolation of Philosophy from prison; he was awaiting execution as well. Machiavelli addressed The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici, who had had him tortured. Hobbes and Milton felt the threats of the English Civil War and of religious persecution. Most “Great” writers would also have been aware of the potential consequences of the act of writing. So, even though esotericism can go too far, on its own it is not what is wrong with Straussianism.
Instead, the question to ask is what we should do with the products of the esoteric method. This way of reading is often taken to elucidate a secret teaching. And this is where Straussians, to my mind, lose their way. Even Strauss seems to. Having framed esoteric reading as part of the “sociology of philosophy,” Strauss goes on to say that it constitutes much of philosophical education itself: “The potential philosophers are to be led step by step from the popular views which are indispensable for all practical and political purposes to the truth which is merely and purely theoretical, guided by certain obtrusively enigmatic features in the presentation of the popular teaching – obscurity of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, strange expressions, etc.” In other words, under the assumption that the writer is a capital-g Great, capital-g Genius, the philosophy student is to apply this method to elicit that writer’s true beliefs, then adopt them.
It’s worth contrasting this with the sort of philosophical education that I am used to trying to provide, trained as I was in the tradition of analytic philosophy. In this tradition, we try to isolate phenomena, questions, puzzles, theories, and arguments that relate to many of the deepest aspects of the human condition and the world we find ourselves in, like questions about what exists, about what it means to be human, about what we ought to believe, and about what we ought to do. These, of course, often come from the works of great writers, but they’re also improved over the course of centuries or even millennia, simplified and protected from the sorts of objections that arise in philosophical discussion. A student is encouraged to think through all assumptions and definitions themselves. Early papers might explain why the premise of some famous argument is doubtful, or why some prominent theory doesn’t resolve the puzzle it aims to resolve. Through this kind of education, students are taught to think carefully, to be aware of the assumptions they make, and to have reasons for what they think and say.
Like the Straussians themselves, many of us trace the beginning of this sort of education to Socrates and Plato. The art of Socratic dialogue, for us, has to do with laying bare the problems with the hasty answers we give to deep and troubling questions. In some sense, those problems come not from the world but from ourselves: a hasty answer in one domain turns out, after the elaboration of some clever reasoning, to contradict a hasty answer in another domain. We learn that even mere consistency is immensely difficult. Of course, not all of Socrates’s (or Plato’s) clever arguments themselves hold up to the scrutiny they’ve been given over thousands of years, but whose would? We don’t usually take our ability to find problems with these great writers to diminish their greatness; rather, their continued relevance for our own philosophical reflections is what constitutes that greatness.
I can’t take for granted that we do things the right way. But the standard contemporary approach to philosophical education provides useful context for my objections to the Straussian alternative.
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First, Straussianism is insufficient for philosophical education. Another quote from Strauss can make this concrete. Discussing the skill of “writing between the lines,” Strauss imagines “a historian living in a totalitarian country . . . led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion.” This historian might frame his advocacy as a criticism:
Nobody would prevent him from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state the liberal view before attacking it … Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think.
In discussing these young men who love to think, Strauss continues:
[They] would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. The attack, the bulk of the work, would consist of virulent expansions of the most virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party. The intelligent young man who, being young, had until then been somehow attracted by those immoderate utterances, would now be merely disgusted and, after having tasted the forbidden fruit, even bored by them. Reading the book for the second and third time, he would detect in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions to those few terse statements which occur in the center of the rather short first part.
What sorts of mechanisms does Strauss think should convince this “reasonable” young reader? There is the liveliness of the prose. There is the taste of the forbidden fruit. There is the disgust at the ruling party line. There is the feel of the arrangement of certain quotations. However, none of these things actually provides reasons for the putatively reasonable young man to change his view. They might provide evidence, through the right application of the esoteric method, about the historian’s own perspective, but this will determine the young man’s new view only if he goes in hoping to simply adhere to his sense of what the historian believes.
From this perspective, the esoteric or Straussian reader is just as sheeplike as the exoteric or vulgar reader: while the latter mindlessly accepts a text’s surface teaching, the former mindlessly accepts its secret teaching. Straussian philosophical education seems to be strangely devoid of the sort of struggling with puzzles, theories, arguments, and assumptions that I described above. The notion that the student might need intellectual tools to assess whether the Great historian is in fact right or wrong somehow doesn’t seem to arise.
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Things get stranger still, because while on the one hand the philosophy student seems to be meant to submit to the secret teaching, on the other hand it seems that they’re supposed to have complete confidence in many of their instinctive judgments. For example, Strauss writes: “If a master of the art of writing commits such blunders as would shame an intelligent high school boy, it is reasonable to assume that they are intentional.” One thing we can imagine a Great writer doing is teaching us that what seems like a blunder can actually be supported by rational argument. But this type of evidence for a secret teaching excludes that possibility.
One instance of this sort of reasoning appears in Costin Alamariu’s book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. (One might call the approach “selective reading and a dearth of philosophy.”) Alamariu writes about Plato’s Gorgias:
The means by which [Plato] shows his covert meaning is, first of all, of course, through Callicles’ own speeches [despite Callicles being the ostensible antagonist of the dialogue] … , through the dramatic setting of the dialogue, and especially through Socrates’ replies to Callicles[, which] can be classified in two categories. These replies are either terribly inadequate and illogical, and de facto leave the superior argument to Callicles, or, when they are not, they do not contradict but rather radicalize and double-up on Callicles.
Alamariu writes later: “Socrates’ replies are weak and inadequate to the point of absurdity.” One such reply, however, is that, if the superior are merely the stronger, then the masses are superior to noble individuals, since they can overpower them. Isn’t that a good response? Alamariu offers some hand-waving about why it is not, but never really demonstrates anything. His discussion is a prime example of the simultaneous overconfidence and deference of some Straussians.
How do we know that the Great author is Great – that they’re “a master of the art of writing” (which means, for Strauss, the art of writing esoterically)? Another oddity is that it seems a lot of the time that we must rely on the judgments of the exoteric or vulgar readers. After all, they are often the ones who decide which texts will end up canonical. Often our first teachers present those popular or public teachings as the real claims of these works. In fact, entire academic literatures spring up around these standard interpretations, which the Straussians end up contesting. (And of course Straussians disagree with each other about interpretive matters as well.) The point is that it’s not clear how the reader is in a position to know that an author is “a master of the art of writing” prior to employing the esoteric method of reading, but this reading seems to rely on the assumption that the author is such a master.
Anyway, the reasoning is close to circular. Because we know this person is so smart, they can’t have said something so dumb. So they must have said something really smart, which we find using our esoteric method. And – golly gee shucks – that’s what proves how smart they are! The fact that philosophy is really hard, that nobody has ever really gotten it right, and that our ability to see mistakes might benefit from millennia of intellectual progress is yet another obvious idea that is never broached.
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Straussianism places the author in an odd intellectual position: they are Great, but a lot of their writing seems stupid on its face, even though that first-pass interpretation is likely the basis on which most people decided that they are Great. But the reader is in an even stranger position. These philosophical cubs must take themselves to be so far above the vulgar that they can dismiss offhand arguments others take seriously in the texts of writers like Plato. Yet they must take themselves to be so far below the Greats that these immense and innate philosophical talents are subordinated once a secret teaching is uncovered, since the goal of uncovering it is simply to believe it. Indeed, when I try to do what I recognize as philosophy, what I often hear Straussians say is: “What, you think you’re smarter than they were?”
But the obvious riposte is that philosophers have made progress. I might have better conceptual tools or intellectual resources that were in fact developed by people much smarter than me, the same way that I might have some facility with calculus where Euclid couldn’t, or have an inkling about relativity theory and quantum mechanics in a way Newton couldn’t. Thus I might recognize a Great writer’s philosophical argument as bad while affirming even that that bad argument is part of what makes them Great, insofar as making it required the sort of philosophical innovation that, without the study of great texts, I might take for granted.
The idea that philosophy is ultimately a set of claims derived from the writings of geniuses is tied to another Straussian view I mentioned before, that philosophy has its own political interests. For most analytic philosophers like me, it is a category error to think of philosophy as the sort of thing that itself has interests or itself makes claims. There is little reason to think that this would or even could be the case.
Rather, philosophers have interests, and philosophers make claims. Many philosophers have made false claims and bad arguments despite being much, much smarter than I am. Awareness of the political difficulties inherent in philosophy should not blind us to the intellectual difficulties inherent in philosophy. It is just very hard to get things right. Any philosophical education – any liberal education whatsoever – that does not equip students with a sense of this difficulty, with a sense of what it would look like to actually get things right, and with the eagerness and energy to try to do so, is in my view quite incomplete.
Oliver Traldi is an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Toledo’s Institute of Constitutional Thought and Leadership and author of Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction.
