In a famous essay asking the question “What is Political Philosophy?” Leo Strauss boldly assessed the state of the discipline in his times: “Today, political philosophy is in a state of decay and perhaps of putrefaction, if it has not vanished altogether,” he wrote. In the same passage, he repeated again his gloomy observation: “We hardly exaggerate when we say that today political philosophy does not exist anymore, except as matter for burial, i.e. for historical research, or else as a theme of weak and unconvincing protests.”

It seems at first glance that this state of affairs has been completely reversed in the last thirty years. Political philosophy appears to have been resurrected. Even in France, so reluctant to deal with the questions raised by political philosophy for most of the twentieth century, there is a strong “Renouveau de la philosophie politique.” In the French context, the standard story-line of this revival goes as follows: in the fifties, sixties and in the first half of the seventies, Marxism, structuralism and the social sciences prevailed in French thought and political philosophy was seen as the harbor of “suspicious liberals” like Raymond Aron, Raymond Polin or Eric Weil. In the middle of the seventies, critics of totalitarianism demolished the stronghold of Marxism.

The void created by the decay of Marxism and more generally by the end of ideologies was filled in the eighties by the import of American political thought and of the new ethics of discourse from Germany. This double movement was accelerated by the final failure of communism in the nineties. During that decade, French political philosophy became acquainted with the American debate between liberals and communitarians, between moderns and post-moderns, etc.