Leo Strauss and Nietzsche

The influential political philosopher Leo Strauss has been credited by conservatives with the recovery of the great tradition of political philosophy stretching back to Plato. Among Strausss most enduring legacies is a strongly negative assessment of Nietzsche as the modern philosopher most at odds with that tradition and most responsible for the sins of twentieth-century culturerelativism godlessness nihilism and the breakdown of family values. In fact this apparent denunciation has become so closely associated with Strauss that it is often seen as the very core of his thought. In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche the eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert offers a controversial new assessment of the Strauss-Nietzsche connection. Lampert undertakes a searching examination of the key Straussian essay "Note on the Plan of Nietzsches Beyond Good and Evil." He shows that this essay written toward the end of Strausss life and placed at the center of his final work reveals an affinity for and debt to Nietzsche greater than Strausss followers allow. Lampert argues that the essay comprises the most important interpretation of Nietzsche ever published one that clarifies Nietzsches conception of nature and of human spiritual history and demonstrates the logical relationship between the essential themes in Nietzsches thoughtthe will to power and the eternal return.