ABSTRACT
Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny was published in 1948, the same year as his essay on how to study Spinoza. This complex book consists of a translation of Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero, also known as Tyrannicus, a work and an author whom Strauss considered unjustly ignored by modern scholars, along with Strauss’s interpretive essay that partly decodes it and partly adds another layer or layers of convoluted meanings. After the philosopher Alexandre Kojève reviewed the book, On Tyranny was reissued in French translation in 1954 with the original material plus Kojève’s review and a response by Strauss, and then in an English edition published in the United States in 1964. (A 1991 edition contains all of this material plus the correspondence between Strauss and Kojève.) Much of the secondary literature that engages this book is devoted to the exchange between Strauss and Kojève and focuses on the debate over the possibility of a world state and Kojève’s apparent defense of Stalinist politics.1 That debate is of some relevance in regard to Strauss’s political position and I will turn to it at the end of this chapter, but I first wish to direct attention to Strauss’s original text. And the question that should be addressed to that text is, is it an exercise in exoteric writing? If On Tyranny is an exoteric book containing a heterodox esoteric meaning, then Strauss, by his own account, would presume that only “careful readers” will read it “literally enough.”
