This conference is devoted to the work of Leo Strauss. It raises the question of the meaning and relevance of his legacy today. The wording of the general conference theme implies that a consideration of this legacy involves the notion of the inherently flawed character of modernity. In the course of the last centuries the omnipresent albeit elusive term “modernity” has acquired many meanings. From its origins in the famous “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” the multifaceted meaning of “modern” developed through various intellectual and aesthetic discourses; but it was not until the 20th century that it crystallized into the collective singular “modernity,” a term intended to designate the present historical era as whole, and the (global) civilization which the ascendancy of the West has brought about.

Why this brief note on the semantics of the term? It was occasioned by my rethinking the title of the talk that I had suggested to the conference organizers. For, first, Leo Strauss figures prominently as a critic of modernity, and secondly he is rightly viewed as a partner in a more general crisis discourse, the particular nature of which is suggested by the names of Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt and Michael Oakeshott. Thus, in order to bring this legacy of political thought into focus, I think it is useful to look at this one particular thinker in the legacy's broader context. All of these thinkers reacted to what they thought was a fundamental crisis that had engulfed the European world. The crisis had reached an extreme expression in totalitarianism, but in their view it was much older and had emerged in the course of the Western civilization well before the catastrophes of the 20th century.