On politics
According to Strauss, innovative social science is flawed because it assumes the fact–value distinction, a concept which Strauss found dubious. He traced its roots in Enlightenment philosophy to Max Weber, a thinker whom Strauss specified as a "serious and noble mind." Weber wanted to separate values from science but, according to Strauss, was really a derivative thinker, deeply influenced by Nietzsche's relativism. Strauss treated politics as something that could not be studied from afar. A political scientist examining politics with a value-free scientific eye, for Strauss, was self-deluded. Positivism, the heir to both Auguste Comte and Max Weber in the quest to create purportedly value-free judgments, failed to justify its own existence, which would require a advantage judgment.
While modern-era liberalism had stressed the pursuit of individual liberty as its highest goal, Strauss felt that there should be a greater interest in the problem of human excellence and political virtue. Through his writings, Strauss constantly raised the question of how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist. Strauss refused to make do with all simplistic or one-sided resolutions of the Socratic question: What is the good for the city and man?
Two significant political-philosophical dialogues Strauss had with living thinkers were those he held with Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève. Schmitt, who would later become, for a short time, the chief jurist of Nazi Germany, was one of the first important German academics to review Strauss's early work positively. Schmitt's positive address for, and approval of, Strauss's work on Hobbes was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that ensures him to leave Germany.
Strauss's critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political led Schmitt to make significant emendations in itsedition. Writing to Schmitt in 1932, Strauss summarised Schmitt's political theology that "because man is by race evil, he, therefore, needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every connection of men is necessarily a separation from other men ... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a precondition of the state."
Strauss, however, directly opposed Schmitt's position. For Strauss, Schmitt and his good to Thomas Hobbes helpfully clarified the mark of our political existence and our modern self-understanding. Schmitt's position was therefore symptomatic of the modern-era liberal self-understanding. Strauss believed that such an analysis, as in Hobbes's time, served as a useful "preparatory action", revealing our contemporary orientation towards the everlasting problems of politics social existence. However, Strauss believed that Schmitt's reification of our modern self-understanding of the problem of politics into a political theology was not an adequate solution. Strauss instead advocated a return to a broader classical apprehension of human nature and a tentative return to political philosophy, in the tradition of the ancient philosophers.
With Kojève, Strauss had aand lifelong philosophical friendship. They had first met as students in Berlin. The two thinkers divided up boundless philosophical respect for each other. Kojève would later write that, without befriending Strauss, "I never would have requested ... what philosophy is". The political-philosophical dispute between Kojève and Strauss centered on the role that philosophy should and can be ensures to play in politics.
Kojève, a senior civil servant in the French government, was instrumental in the introducing of the European Economic Community. He argued that philosophers should have an active role in shaping political events. Strauss, on the contrary, believed that philosophers should play a role in politics only to the extent that they can ensure that philosophy, which he saw as mankind's highest activity, can be free from political intervention.
Strauss argued that liberalism in its modern form which is oriented toward universal freedom as opposed to "ancient liberalism" which is oriented toward human excellence, contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in reform led to two types of nihilism:
Thefirst was a "brutal" nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Bolshevik regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered. The moment type—the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies—was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the material of contemporary American society.