Abstract

This chapter is primarily based on an unpublished seminar entitled “The Political Philosophy of Karl Marx,” which Leo Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey in 1960 at the University of Chicago. The seminar sheds new light both on Strauss’ attitude to Marx and on his own classroom teaching. It reveals how Strauss’ fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the important role that Marxism played as an intellectual challenge to his later political thinking, exposing little-known sides of Strauss’ approach to teaching the history of political philosophy. Marx occupies a key place in Strauss’ description of the crisis of modernity, and is located in the last phase of the second wave of modernity.