The first walgreen lectures by Leo Strauss (1949)

Abstract

[Excerpt] In 1949, Leo Strauss began teaching at the University of Chicago, after he had spent almost a decade at the New School for Social Research.1 Almost as soon as he arrived, in the Autumn quarter, between October 17 and 28, Strauss delivered his first set of Walgreen Lectures, under the title “Natural Right and History,”2 which cemented his reputation at the university. The lectures are original and profound, and immediately aroused both admiration and a sense of strangeness. In the years that followed, sympathetic and critical commentators3 alike expected the lectures to be followed by a systematic exposition by Strauss on the substance of natural law, because they deemed them “an able presentation of basic principles of the traditionalist point of view.”4