The Crisis of German Historicism
The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss

A comparative intellectual history of the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, two influential and controversial German-Jewish-American political philosophers.

Liisi Keedus (Author)

9781107093034, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 February 2015

246 pages
23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.5 kg

'I believe the great merit of the book consists in broadening the scope of themes and authors to which and whom Strauss and Arendt have related and in introducing much new source material.' Wout Cornelissen, History of Political Thought

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German-Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.

Introduction
1. The untimely generation
2. The problem of politics in Arendt's and Strauss' early writings
3. History and political understanding: an ambivalent symbiosis
4. Liberalism and modernity: rethinking the question of the 'proud'
5. Retrieving the problem of theoria and praxis: the antagonisms
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]