The City and Man

by Leo Strauss

Book Overview

The City and Man consists of provocative essays by the late Leo Strauss on Aristotle's Politics, Plato's Republic, and Thucydides' Peloponnesian Wars. Together, the essays constitute a brilliant attempt to use classical political philosophy as a means of liberating modern political philosophy from the stranglehold of ideology. The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226777014
• ISBN13: 9780226777016
• Release Date: November 1978
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Review Originally Posted in Goodreads

Wow. All I can say is "wow, what a read." For an author that seemingly dislikes the use of paragraphs, Strauss' books are in the small minority of dense reads that I find worth the time to struggle through. He is/was an extremely intelligent man who, fun for us, or maybe just fun for me, writes in code; Strauss' works are, as he may say, a "silent instruction." The City and Man is certainly no exception to this rule. Don't like philosophical spoilers? Then stop reading this review because the following are, in my view, a few code breakers for interpreting this Straussian text. I'll keep it somewhat brief. NOMOS: Nomos is conventional, relative truth; a fabricated, normative reality. Even when not explicitly using this word (i.e. the picture in a frame) Strauss is always talking about nomos within his tacit instruction (i.e. the frame around the picture). Through mental constructs, our perception is overlaid with the markings of cultural values, beliefs, ideals, nationalities, habits, lines of thinking, and ways of proceeding. Perception is distorted in accordance with conditioning. First there is a cognition, THEN a cognitive distortion. The `city' overwhelms `nature'. Personally, my ears perk up whenever someone uses the phrase "the real world." NATURE: Awareness. Simple as that. Awareness precedes thought and hence can't be captured by the modality of thought and other mental phenomena. Before the advent of the city, our natural state (awareness) lies free of values and judgments -On a side note the contemplative practice of meditation may assist us in experientially seeing this. Moreover nature is the `whole', the whole phenomenal world that is. Reminiscent of eastern and Gnostic philosophies, we are the world and the world is us. We lie in ourselves and fail to realize it because we alienate ourselves from ourselves (consciousness becomes fragmented within itself through abstract categories and interpretive schemas). POLITICS: The interaction between people. But as far as rhetoric is concerned it is the manipulation of nomos for specific consequences. By fashioning mental artifacts that shape and organize experience into specified constellations, philosophers persuade the masses through their mouthpieces that are the politicians. However, those that have broken free from this mental-social immersion (Plato's Cave) are no longer influenced by these political games and are thus free to participate in the further propagation of myths, stand aloof, or divulge this information in the attempt to liberate others. To be just or unjust is the question...or maybe this is a false, dualistic dilemma. After all the entire normative landscape, by being grounded in fiction, is specious to begin with. RANDOM BITS AND PIECES: Every now and then Strauss throws in a random chunky paragraph or `misplaced' sentence that provides contextual clues. Duly note these clues because their counterparts will most likely appear, indirectly of course, ten or twent

The city and the political philosophy

The city is the place where the Political Philosophy take there fulfill sense. It's the cavern where the philosopher must return and explain, with precaution, his Knowledge. Furthermore he must guide the city and the people on the right way. Trough, it's necessary explain and know what is the city, which it is their nature, what it is their relationship with the philosopher.In this sense, in this book Strauss related us the answers to that's questions. He teaches us three different, but complementary, views of the city: the political, the philosophic and the historical perspective of the city.He gives us numerous clues that it's must take us to value the risks of the single natural human association. He pushes us to think, in the last part of the book, about the risks of overcoming the natural limits of the city. So,he invites us to share his discussion as regards the world state. As it's common in their books, it is an excellent index from the problems to those faces the political philosophy. I recommend it to you.edsallent@eresmas.com

Two Types of Reason, Two Types of Justice

Leo Strauss was generally uderstood to be an originator of the scholarly opinion that Plato wrote esoterically, and Plato's dialogue on justice, "The Republic" has an exoteric message (to the outsiders) and an esoteric message (to the insiders). In 'City and Man' Strauss carefully, elegantly, systematically crafts the arguement by comparing and contrasting a historian, a philospher and finally a poltical scientist. In this neat way of using real men's works, in their historical context, the careful reader can come to appreciate why it was necessary for Plato to write esoterically and why it is consistent with Justice, or say Nature. Easily, yet strikingly, Strauss leads one through the birth of political philosophy, as a political-philosophy, not as a philosophical study of things political. P.S. I love this book.

Just for 21st-century enlightened people

Can you imagine a world of harmony between human mind and the whole so that learned people had trustful knowledge (not either blind faith or questionable hypothesis!) as regards the superiority of the soul to the body, a man's perfecting were not second to his comfortable self-preservation, and everybody conceived of justice as a means to procure common happiness? However close to a utopia, this is the way in which the Greek classical thinkers faced political things twenty-four hundred years ago.Some of them were nothing more (or less) than philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; some others, like Thucydides and Xenophon, were hard-die warriors as well. In a sense, they could not be more realistic. For justice was also understood by them as the outcome of political prudence or the practical wisdom to handle situations in order to serving right and reasonably yielding to compulsion altogether. And how was it that the classics accomplished so unexpected a synthesis of the idea of Justice as a heavenly reward for the wise management of the clash between Right and Compulsion in the pursuit of common happiness? Leo Strauss masterfully tells us in The City and Man