Leo Strauss on social and natural science: two previously unpublished papers

Abstract

The papers presented in this paper constitute a kind of debate. Leo Strauss and Kurt Riezler agreed that social science in its current form is indefensible. Economists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, and historians all study human beings and the societies they form from a variety of perspectives, with different methods, and a demonstrated inability to explain how the findings of these varied disciplines can be integrated or related. Strauss and Riezler disagreed, however, about the proper response to that disarray