LEO STRAUSS E LA RETORICA DEL RITORNO

«A journey from Jerusalem to Athens». In this way Rémi Brague describes the intellectual path of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), one of the most influent and controversial philosopher of the XX century. Following this journey from his early formation to the late years, this work tries to reconstruct the historical and philosophical background that led Strauss to pursuit a return to classical political philosophy as a response to the crisis of the modern world. Deeply affected by the failure of the liberal Weimar Republic, which he considered as the sorry spectacle of a «justice without sword» incapable to stop the emergence of the Nazi forces, Strauss spent his life trying to restore a form of premodern rationalism based on the balance between philosophy and religion. If the XVII century rationalism opened the season of the conquest of nature and of the trust in the rational organization of society, Strauss seeks for a renewal of the quarrel between ancients and moderns that brings to a new definition of the theological-political problem, which is to say to a reprise of the bound between divine and political power. Just a re-enactment of the natural right as emanation of a divine order can ensure, for Strauss, social peace and cohesion, against the fragmentation of the modern liberal system. While philosophers can live without illusions, facing a hopeless or deadly truth about human condition, non-philosophers need to be protected from this truth with a theological-political order that gives meaning and direction to individual and collective life. That’s why Jerusalem and Athens have to be restored as the two, irreconcilable, poles of the Western tradition, because in their tension is hidden, for the philosopher Strauss, the secret of its vitality, the secret of the balance between philosophy as “quest for wisdom” that cannot ensure a stable political order, and religion as the source of that order. But, what’s the purpose of a philosophical search that despairs of making political, ethical, and collective life more rational and capable of increase, as Spinoza teaches, individual’s possibilities?