A Faculty Roundtable, featuring Leo Paul de Alvarez, Jonathan Culp, Richard Dougherty, Tiffany Jones Miller, and Thomas G. West, discuss whether Leo Strauss exaggerated the break between Ancient and Modern thinkers regarding such matters as virtue, morality, politics, human nature, and theology.
Did Strauss exaggerate the break between the Ancients and Moderns in order to revive the serious study of Classical political philosophers, such as Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, or did he believe that there were fundamental differences between these thinkers and Modern political philosophers, starting with Machiavelli and followed by such thinkers as Hobbes and Locke? Did Strauss believe that there was some agreement between the Ancients and the Moderns?