The Critique of Leo Strauss to Modernist Political Thought

As a conservative philosopher, Leo Strauss reconsiders and criticizes modern political thought methodologically and epistemologically, in that he believes it has faced crises leading history of philosophical thinking to deviate. To put simply, Strauss claims that the major part of critical thinking arisen in the West is the by-product of the modern political thought. According to this, the present paper reviews Strauss's critique of modern political thought, putting the question "what kind of insights and enlightenments does Strauss' critique of modern political thought encompass?" As a finding of the research, we can hold that Strauss attempted to show that methodology of historical and epistemology of relativism governing modern political thought disregard trans-spatial and timeless principles of natural law; as a result, it substitutes suspicion for real knowledge and certainty. Thus, it encourages nihilism; on the one hand, it introduces any form of autonomous agreement by human beings as fair right, as it neglects universal morality on the other hand, turning it to the matter of validity. Therefore, it resorts to irresponsibility, and eventually introduces human reason as the only instrumental benchmark for living rules, which in turn encompasses the emergence of totalitarianism. The method of the research is an analytical-descriptive method.