On June 7, 2007 the opinion page of The New York Times carried a piece by Jenny Strauss Clay, daughter of Leo Strauss. With a candid fervor, she sought to distance her father’s legacy from the masterminds of the neo-conservative ideologues of the American foreign policy. She tells us that Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws. He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised unworked utopianism—in our time, Nazism and Communism—which is predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one’s own deepest concerns. And yes, Jenny Strauss reminds us that his greatest passions were to raise rabbits (Flemish Giants) and read Plato with his students.

The nephew of Wassily Kandinsky, Alexandre Kojeve/ Kozhevnikov’s seminars on Hegel from 1933-1939 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, as is well known, fundamentally influenced much of modern French thought, including that of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, Bataille and Althusser, Breton and Queneau—all his students at some point. Kojeve’s thought also philosophically encouraged a different breed of social and political thinkers: Raymond Aron in France, Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama in the US, to name a select few. Kojeve himself spent the final 25 years of his life as a trade negotiator and civil servant under de Gaulle and helped establish the European Economic Community (now EU) as a model for his universal and homogenous state.

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