This chapter describes Gadamer’s initial understanding of the nature and significance of Platonic philosophy in terms of dialogue and dialectic. It then provides a brief account of Gadamer’s own interpretive method as presented in Truth and Method. The chapter then shows how Gadamer changed his understanding of Plato, particularly in relation to Aristotle. The chapter shows how this new understanding of Plato provides the ontological foundation for Gadamer’s own “hermeneutics.” Finally, we see how Gadamer’s readings of ancient philosophers constitute a fundamental challenge and correction to the mode of interpretation still dominant in Anglo-American philosophy.

Leo Strauss was one of the German émigrés who brought twentieth-century Continental philosophy to America when they fled Hitler in the 1930s. He spent most of his American career at two universities: the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. Although he had written several books in Europe prior to his arrival in America, his American writings brought him the most notice. His best-known book was Natural Right and History (1953), but he wrote many other notable works, including Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) and The City and Man (1964). All of his works fit under the broad rubric of political philosophy.

Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century began as a special issue of The Review of Politics intended to illustrate the variety and depth of philosophical analyses of politics in the face of the purported demise of political philosophy. With the addition of ten new essays this book expands the range of positions and arguments represented.

We thought it desirable to demonstrate the richness and vitality of philosophical reflection on political issues in the twentieth century in response to the many observations of its weakness, if not death. As Dana Villa observes as the beginning of his chapter on Arendt, “in the 1970s and 1980s, students of political theory invariably encountered the cliché that political theory and philosophy died sometime in the 1950s, only to be revived in 1971 by the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.” Much as he admires Rawls's work, Villa is nevertheless “taken somewhat aback by the radical foreshortening of the history of political thought implied by this cliché. After all, the 1950s and early 1960s saw the publication of some of the most interesting – and enduring – works of political theory of the past sixty years or so.” A few “landmarks” of “what was, in retrospect, a remarkably fertile period for political thought” include Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (1953), Eric Voegelin's Order and History (1956–7), Isaiah Berlin's Four Essays on Liberty (1969), Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1963), Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism and Politics (1962), and Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and On Revolution (1963).