Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

A New Book: Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique

Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique

By Grant N. Havers

Northern Illinois University Press, 245 pages

Table of Contents
1—Saving Anglo-Americans from Themselves
2—Athens in Anglo-America
3—Leo Strauss, from Left to Right
4—Churchill, the Anglo-American Greek?
5—The Anglo-American Struggle with Strauss
6—Leo Strauss and the Uniqueness of the West

Reviewed By Anne Norton

The American Conservative • April 8, 2014

Grant Havers, a professor at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, has written an erudite and thoughtful study of Leo Strauss and the philosophical and political forces he fathered in the new world. As the title promises, Havers examines Strauss’s legacy in the context of Anglo-American democracy. Havers argues that Strauss is not the conservative that writers on the left and right have taken him for, but an honest and avowed friend of liberalism.
Yet Strauss’s turn to the ancients, especially the pagan philosophers of Greece, is a hazard for an Anglo-American democracy built on Christian foundations, Havers contends. The search for timeless truths and natural rights has led to reckless efforts to spread democracy. Strauss’s rejection of historicism and commitment to the universal made him blind to the importance of the English and Christian cultural foundations of Anglo-American democracy.
In any revelatory study, there is always the moment when the reader thinks “That’s true. I should have seen that.” For me, that moment came with Havers’s account—learned, subtle, and occasionally surprising—of Strauss’s liberalism.

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