Monozigote · CC BY-SA 4.0

Strauss argued that ancient and medieval philosophers often wrote esoterically, encoding one teaching for careful readers beneath another for everyone else, and that recovering their questions was a corrective to what he saw as modern philosophy's slide into relativism. Born in Germany, he emigrated in 1937 and taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969, where his seminars trained a generation of political theorists. Several of his students and interpreters went on to shape the postwar American neoconservative movement, a legacy still debated among his own former students.