ABSTRACT
Surprise and curiosity are the students' general reaction to the lectures on Leo Strauss. This response naturally grew after the media proclaimed Strauss as the intellectual inspiration for the neo-conservatives. But the students' interest in Strauss is intellectual, not primarily political, and the author witnessed that long before recent political events. Historical sense had made all values and ideals relative to the historical period or context in which they had been created. The 'historical sense', however, managed to moderate the relative nature of 'values in context' by integrating them into a hierarchy of rational progress. Nietzsche and Heidegger are necessary outcomes of modern political philosophy. Historical sense had made all values and ideals relative to the historical period or context in which they had been created. Strauss writes: Liberal education is the counter-poison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but 'specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart'.
