LAUSR

ABSTRACT The publication of Steven Smith’s Modernity and Its Discontents is a reminder that the intellectual legacy of Leo Strauss remains highly influential in the USA. This paper sets the book in the context of the main features of Strauss’s thought and Straussian ideas more generally. It argues that this context is an almost exclusively American one, and that the enduring appeal of the Straussian historical narrative lies in the presentist justifications it supplies for a conservative political orientation. A re-examination of Strauss’s ideas based on contemporary critiques of his work and on his own theory of the nature of historical understanding suggests the intellectual tradition of German romanticism that Straussianism represents is no longer a viable context for understanding the intellectual history of modernity.