The City and Man
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: November 15, 1978
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780226777016
Subjects: Political science & theory; General; Philosophy / General; Philosophy
First sentence: According to the traditional view, it was not Aristotle but Socrates who originated political philosophy or political science.
Description: The City and Man consists of provocative essays by the late Leo Strauss on Aristotle's Politics, Plato's Republic, and Thucydides' Peloponnesian Wars. Together, the essays constitute a brilliant attempt to use classical political philosophy as a means of liberating modern political philosophy from the stranglehold of ideology. The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on the philosopher who largely shaped Strauss's conception of antiquity. The essay on Plato is a full-scale discussion of Platonic political philosophy, wide in scope yet compact in execution. When discussing Thucydides, Strauss succeeds not only in presenting the historian as a moral thinker of high rank, but in drawing his thought into the orbit of philosophy, and thus indicating a relation of history and philosophy that does not presuppose the absorption of philosophy by history.