Introduction

Abstract

[Excerpt] Toward Natural Right and History brings together lectures and essays that Leo Strauss wrote between 1937 and 1946.1 During this prolific period at the New School for Social Research, after his decisive turn toward classical thought, but before the publication of his major works, Strauss was writing extensively. At the University of Chicago in the fall of 1949, just after leav-ing the New School, he gave his first series of Walgreen Lectures, a set of six lectures that in revised and expanded form was eventually published in 1953 as Natural Right and History. The book was essentially faithful to the texts he prepared for the Walgreen Lectures, lectures that, owing to time constraints, he considerably abbreviated while delivering them. The lectures and the book took shape over a long time, beginning, in a way, at least as early as the 19305.2 But his first decade in the United States can be regarded as the period during which the mature Strauss was working out the details of the arguments that would be expressed in Natural Right and History. Leo Strauss developed its fundamental structure, wrote "drafts" of the work, and prepared a number of lectures in which he established the central arguments of the future book, though not always with the same emphasis or along the same lines as in the final version. [...]