Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

Arendt formulated her response around the theory of political totalitarianism. Strauss took a different route. He believed that the origins of Auschwitz -- and of Western political evil in general -- were not socio-political but philosophical. More precisely, a shift in the role of the philosopher in Western society.

The key to Strauss' theory rests in his best known work Persecution and the Art of Writing, and most of all in his writings on Maimonides. Strauss saw in Maimonides the epitome of the esoteric philosopher. That is, the philosopher who thinks freely but acts responsibly. According to Strauss, Maimonides violated Jewish law and Jewish communal and religious norms in his philosophy. However, when he came to write The Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides hid these potentially explosive revelations behind "seven seals." That is, he wrote the book in a manner that would render its troubling content unintelligible to all but the most learned readers. Only those who could be trusted to act responsibly with its contents would be capable of understanding it.

Strauss saw the dark side of modernity epitomized in the character of the exoteric philosopher; a philosopher who spoke truths which could upend society without regard to their possible effects; Machiavelli, Spinoza and Nietzsche being among the most important examples. This new tradition led, ultimately, to the upheavals which gave birth to Nazism and, ultimately, Auschwitz itself.

In many ways, it is this theory that offends Strauss' enemies the most. The current ideal philosopher is absolutely exoteric. He is engaged in his society for the purposes of changing it for the better. The philosopher, or the intellectual, we idealize today is the philosopher who speaks out fearlessly without regard for the possible ill effects of his ideas. We have come to believe that democracy itself depends upon it.

Strauss' theory of Western history negates this idea completely. The role of his perfect philosopher is simply to philosophize. He is obliged, in fact, to leave everyone else alone. The esoteric philosopher lives out a paradox within his own society. The means by which the philosopher and society coexist, according to Strauss, is through the process of esotericism.

For those who believe ideas have the capacity to change the world, such a point of view is anathema; a heresy in and of itself. Ironically, Strauss agreed that ideas were immensely powerful. There may be no other 20th century philosopher who believed so strongly in the power of ideas. But he diverged from the mainstream in his belief that this power was simply power and had no inherent moral value. That is, ideas are not inherently good, but they are always powerful. Bad ideas can do extraordinarily bad things. 20th century intellectuals tended to believe that exoteric philosophy would lead to utopia; Strauss believed that it led to Auschwitz.

It is for this particular heresy, more than anything else, that Strauss is despised. He formulated an idea which is simply demonic in the eyes of mainstream intellectual opinion today: that it is sometimes better for philosophers and intellectuals to keep their mouths shut; or, at least, to dispense their opinions with a certain amount of care and decorum. In an age where our innumerable Ward Churchills and Noam Chomskys can get away with the most barbarous forms of crypto-Nazism by shrieking that they are speaking truth to power, Strauss is indeed the enemy that his detractors believe him to be. The neocon conspiracy and the noble lie are only manifestations of a deeper and more profound rejection of Strauss' entire theory of Western civilization. It is up to us, I suppose, to decide whether we have more to fear from the esoteric philosopher or the new Inquisitors of a more outspoken age.