ABSTRACT
Befitting a man who made a life and an intellectual reputation out of indirection and prudence, Leo Strauss came to public attention in the United States and elsewhere not through a desire for publicity on his part but through the actions and writings of others. Devoted as he was to friends and students, it was his friends and students-and a friend of one of his students-who dragged his memory out of the academic cave in which it was seemingly interred and into the light of journalistic hyperbole. As a result, and without hyperbole, we can now see that, in terms of the exercise of political power in the United States, this retiring professor may turn out to have been the most influential political philosopher of his generation.
