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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