ABSTRACT
In his 1965 autobiographical preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Leo Strauss never discusses the substance of the book itself. Instead, he situates the writing of it in terms of his struggle with the so-called theologicalpolitical problem in the 1920s. Then, at the end of the preface, referencing his review essay on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Strauss makes the following assertion, already quoted above in chapter 2:
The present study was based on the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to premodern philosophy is impossible. The change of orientation which found its first expression, not entirely by accident, in the article published at the end of this volume, compelled me to engage in a number of studies in the course of which I became ever more attentive to the manner in which heterodox thinkers of earlier ages wrote their books. As a consequence of this, I now read the Theologico-political Treatise differently than I read it when I was young. I understood Spinoza too literally because I did not read him literally enough.1
