Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. By Leora Batnitzky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 304p. $80.00.

In recent years, Leo Strauss has achieved a posthumous success de scandal as the (purported) philosophical architect of neoconservatism. Strauss's works have been scrutinized by detractors and partisans to determine whether he bears responsibility for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Amidst the clamor, however, more measured assessments are starting to emerge. Today, the most provocative appraisals of his work come from scholars in Jewish studies, as Leora Batnitzky's fascinating book attests. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Batnitzky seeks to establish Strauss's contribution to modern Jewish thought, but her argument for his importance as a Jewish thinker also reframes the vexed question of his legacy for American politics. She offers a nonpolemical, non-Straussian defense of Leo Strauss. In many ways, her portrait of Strauss as a philosophical skeptic and political moderate resonates with that of Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (2006). However, Batnitzky departs from Smith (and, indeed, from most readers of Strauss) when she hails Strauss as the most ardent philosophical defender of Jewish revelation in the modern period.