Leo Strauss on Hegel, edited by Paul Franco, is best approached as a carefully prepared aperture onto Strauss’s most sustained confrontation with Hegelian philosophy, one in which the familiar antitheses of ancient and modern, reason and history, faith and politics, are pressed to their limits within the concrete discipline of a seminar that reads Hegel’s Philosophy of History aloud, sentence by sentence.
The book transmits the winter 1965 University of Chicago course—sixteen sessions preserved on remastered tapes and edited with contextual notes—supplemented where helpful by material from the earlier 1958 course for which tapes do not survive. Franco’s editorial headnote specifies the textual base (J. Sibree’s English translation, corrected against German sources as needed) and the pedagogical setting: students read Hegel’s paragraphs; Strauss interrupts, glosses, questions, and provokes; the transcript records not a finished treatise but a teacher’s living questioning of a notoriously difficult thinker. The result is not a reduction of Hegel to a thesis Strauss already holds, but a scrupulous attempt to grasp Hegel on his own terms while measuring those terms against the enduring problems of political philosophy.
Franco’s introduction situates the course in the arc of Strauss’s published and unpublished engagements, emphasizing how rarely Strauss devoted extended public writing to Hegel and how much richer the classroom record is than the occasional remarks scattered through essays on modernity and historicism. The editor reconstructs three principal interfaces: Strauss’s 1930s Hobbes studies, the exchange with Kojève in On Tyranny, and the thematic frame of the “three waves” of modern political philosophy. In each context Hegel functions less as a mere “domino” in a schematic history than as a significant pivot: the Hobbes–Hegel problem signals a modern philosophical attitude grounded in fear of violent death and a turn to history; the Kojèvian dialogue crystallizes the end-of-history question; and the “second wave” orientation of Rousseau–Kant–Hegel locates freedom, rather than reason alone, at the center of political and moral self-understanding. Franco’s survey is not only narrative; it establishes the questions that structure the 1965 course: the relation between rationality and reality, between the teleology of Spirit and the empirical historian’s craft, between the modern constitutional state and the sources of obligation capable of sustaining it.
Within the seminar Strauss is explicit about his stance. He is not a Hegelian; he does not believe that history as a whole is rational. Yet he refuses the easy posture of dismissal, insisting on Hegel’s “immense intellectual power” and the permanent interest of insights yielded by that power. The self-imposed task is to learn to read Hegel carefully enough that one can disagree only after genuine understanding. That commitment establishes the book’s tone: the patient, sometimes amused, but never condescending reconstruction of arguments that have tempted generations to polemics.
A cardinal virtue of the course, captured with clarity in this edition, is Strauss’s insistence that Hegel’s philosophy of history is not a priori myth-making. Hegel says the philosopher of history “must take history as it is,” and Strauss shows how Hegel proceeds empirically, allowing the reason in history to appear from a sober attention to events, institutions, and self-understandings rather than from metaphysical fiat. That does not abolish selection: every historian must distinguish the important from the unimportant, and every such act of discrimination imports categories. But “empirical” here means that Hegel’s categories are pulled through the texture of what peoples actually do and revere; there is no license for “arbitrary constructions and monkey business.” The editorial presentation keeps this accent on method squarely in view and shows how Strauss, in class, defends Hegel’s empirical rigor against students tempted to read him as a system-builder indifferent to evidence.
The point of entry into that empirical rigor is Hegel’s claim that a culture is intelligible from what it bows to. Strauss repeatedly formulates this as the “primacy of religion”: to comprehend a people as it comprehended itself, one must discover what it holds highest, what it reveres as divine, what it will sacrifice to and for. That primacy is the interpreter’s first clue to the Folkgeist; history’s philosophical articulation begins from what is honored, prohibited, blessed, or blasphemed. This is why Thucydides, who self-consciously brackets divine interference in recounting the Peloponnesian War, cannot by himself disclose the core of Greek civilization; one must also know the Greek gods—what the city sings, swears by, and fears—to understand Greek freedom. The transcript preserves Strauss pressing students toward this deeper register, anchoring Hegel’s procedure in a disciplined cultural hermeneutic rather than an abstract dialectic.
That hermeneutic rigor immediately strains against contemporary egalitarian instincts. Facing Hegel’s hierarchical judgments about Africa, China, and India, students ask about fairness. Strauss acknowledges the scandal while clarifying the standard: for Hegel the measure is not arbitrary; science and political liberty are privileged because they orient a society toward self-critique and self-government—two criteria many still recognize as enviable even if the nineteenth-century confidence they enjoyed has dimmed. The editorial notes let the reader see Strauss urging symmetrical fairness: if China and India have a claim to even-handedness, so too does Hegel. He does not license racial exclusion from the modern state; indeed, Strauss calls attention to Carl Schmitt’s caustic remark that “Hegel died” in January 1933—proof, in Schmitt’s view and Strauss’s polemical usage, that National Socialism was an anti-Hegelian catastrophe. The transcript thus helps decouple Hegelian political philosophy from crude accusations of proto-totalitarianism.
The political upshot of this fairness is a portrait of Hegel that is both more liberal and less democratic than popular caricature suggests. Strauss insists that Hegel is no deifier of the state and no precursor of twentieth-century totalitarianism; he accepts nineteenth-century constitutional monarchy, assumes a free economic sphere secured by law against fraud, and affirms the rights of man—property, inviolability of the person, religious liberty—as natural principles knowable by reason. At the same time Hegel is not a democrat; the rational state is administered by an educated, independent civil service, with monarchy providing a formal cap that prevents politics from degenerating into the aggregation of atomic wills. If one wanted a single formula for Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Strauss says in the earlier course to which Franco often refers, it would be the rights of man plus a wholly independent civil service. The transcript renders these judgments concrete and shows Strauss pushing back against students who arrive armed with the cliché that Hegel worships the state.
The hinge between Hegel’s liberal juridical commitments and his anti-democratic institutional preference is his analysis of how reason becomes actual in history. Strauss takes as emblematic a claim he formulates early in the course: order comes from disorder without being intended. Hegel generalizes Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”: passions, self-interest, and the pursuit of private advantage—not moral elevation—are the principal means Spirit employs to realize a rational political order. Strauss draws the parallel explicitly: the market’s anarchy can yield lawful prosperity; likewise, the immoral or amoral energies of world-historical individuals can, without their intending it, move a civilization from a decaying principle to a higher one. This is not praise of vice; it is a sober estimate of the causal economy by which any rational order that is more than an edifying dream could ever come to be. The edition preserves Strauss’s effort to articulate this economy without sliding into cynicism or moralism.
The figure of the “world-historical individual” concentrates the ambiguity in Hegel’s account. Strauss’s rendering is notable for its distance from Machiavelli’s tougher teaching: Hegel in a way moralizes the hero by showing how the hero’s particular striving is taken up as a vehicle for the universal. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon did not set out to realize reason; their thirst for glory or domination is undeniable. Yet under the pressure of historical necessity, they accomplish public tasks the moralists could never secure. Even so, Strauss rejects the inference that Hegel’s principle excuses the enormities of the twentieth century: the transcript shows him musing, with heavy irony, on whether Hegel would have countenanced Stalin’s mass murder under the rubric of trampling “innocent flowers.” The implied answer is no; the logic that makes sense of Alexander and Napoleon does not legitimate the despotic annihilation of persons or the abrogation of an independent judiciary—the rational state’s minimal moral architecture.
None of this exonerates the Hegelian doctrine from Strauss’s most penetrating challenge, which returns again and again in this volume: whether Hegel’s identification of the rational and the real culminates in the doctrine that history has reached its telos. The owl of Minerva, taking flight at dusk, is for Strauss the motto of the course. It can be read as the philosophical confession that insight comes only when a living form of life is already fading; wisdom is retrospective, not legislative. But it has a second, darker implication: if modernity is the moment at which Spirit comes to full self-consciousness—if the contradictions are reconciled in the modern constitutional state—then history’s creative energy is spent.
There can be expansion in space, but no new principles. Strauss explores this reading with Spengler at his elbow and Nietzsche in mind: the end of history means not glory but twilight; not the fullness of the human, but the satisfaction of Nietzsche’s “last men.” Franco’s introduction lays out the textual evidence—Hegel’s remark that America is the “land of the future” and Strauss’s counter that such a remark does not predict new principles—and records Strauss’s view that Hegel did generally think his own moment was the peak. The equilibrium between a completed reason and a withering vitality troubles Strauss and animates some of the most searching pages in the transcript.
The ambiguity has a precise political correlate. If the rational state is modern Europe’s settlement, what binds it together? Strauss returns here to the primacy of religion and locates a structural tension in Hegel’s teaching. On the one hand, Protestant Christianity is treated as the historical matrix in which subjective freedom becomes objective, the cultural bedrock on which modern constitutional order rests. On the other hand, the state is indifferent to its citizens’ specific confessional adhesion so long as some membership in a religious community obtains.
The result is a condition in which those who partake of reason only through religion gradually lose naive faith under the corrosive light of culture and commerce; but they receive nothing adequate in its stead. Philosophy cannot stand in for religion as a general social bond; the many cannot become philosophers. Strauss’s image—when newspapers replace daily prayer, society is emptied—captures a problem Hegelians today often evade: the rational state as Hegel imagined it dissolves the very substance it needs to endure. This edition makes that dilemma stark, and it refuses to supply comforts Hegel did not.
The Kojèvian horizon sharpens the stakes. The universal and homogeneous state, which Kojève advances as the next step in the logic of recognition, is to Strauss only half Hegel: what is universal and homogeneous is Marx’s supplement, not Hegel’s own concrete constitutionalism. And even granting Kojève’s terms—abolition of war and poverty, leisure for philosophy—Strauss doubts such a world resolves the deeper deficit, the loss of shared meanings potent enough to bind nonphilosophical citizens without coercion. Franco annotates these turns with care, showing where Strauss agrees that Kojève “wrote probably the best book on Hegel in this generation” and where he insists that Kojève has retained the vocabulary but lost the texture of Hegel’s argument about religion and the state.
Because Franco frames the seminar against Strauss’s larger conception of modernity, the reader sees how Hegel sits within Strauss’s history of political philosophy. In What Is Political Philosophy? and “The Three Waves of Modernity,” the second wave is Rousseau’s revolution in naming freedom as man’s distinctiveness; Kant radicalizes this by identifying will and practical reason; and Hegel synthesizes the new morality of freedom with the actualization of reason through history, completing an arc that begins with Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s “lowering of the goal” to guarantee a realizable order.
The course vividly illustrates how, for Strauss, Hegel remains the most philosophic expositor of the modern project’s wager: that the best regime will be not the precarious fruit of rare self-sacrifice but the unintended byproduct of passions aligned by institutions. The invisible hand becomes a universal mechanism. Franco’s selections keep together Strauss’s sympathy for the grandeur of this vision and his worry that it abolishes the very standard by which politics can be judged.
The editor’s decision to base the class on The Philosophy of History rather than The Philosophy of Right is itself illuminating. Strauss argues in the first session that Hegel’s political philosophy is “essentially related” to his historical matrix; the state cannot be known apart from the path by which it arrives. Moreover, Hegel’s spoken lectures are more accessible than his published prose, a remark that any Hegel reader can appreciate and that applies as well to Strauss’s own teaching: the spoken word discloses the inner articulation of arguments more readily than the compressed and forbidding diction of print. The transcript therefore gives the reader a methodological demonstration: how to read a classic text philosophically and historically at once, without allowing either register to swallow the other.
If one asks how this book changes the study of Strauss and of Hegel, three contributions stand out. First, it documents Strauss’s refusal of the crude “Hegel the totalitarian” thesis. When a student voices a familiar suspicion, Strauss replies that Hegel accepted constitutional monarchy, took a free economic sphere for granted, and was in that sense a liberal; he adds elsewhere that Hegel’s state is unthinkable without the rights of man and a judiciary independent of party. The editorial apparatus helpfully notes the earlier course’s even fuller exposition of this line—rights plus bureaucracy under law as the “two pillars” of the rational state—and registers Strauss’s insistence that nothing about this position licenses communism or fascism. The simplifications of mid-century polemic are, in these pages, replaced by historical sobriety.
Second, it retrieves Strauss’s account of Hegel’s empiricism and with it a way of reading world history that is neither antiquarian nor ideological. The pages on the Folkgeist show how a people’s self-understanding is legible through its objects of reverence; the passages on Africa, China, and India display the difficult labor of comparative judgment without which philosophy of history collapses into sentimentality or chauvinism. Strauss’s admonition to grant Hegel the fairness we demand for non-European civilizations is exemplary of a pedagogical ethic this book conveys as much by showing as by saying.
Third, it clarifies the theologico-political knot at the heart of Hegel’s settlement—how a state that depends on Protestantism’s moral psychology can remain religiously indifferent without secularizing itself into vacuity. Strauss’s image of the newspaper replacing prayer is not a sneer at modernity but a precise diagnosis of how forms of common life depend on rites and speech that are not themselves the products of legislation. The transcript’s candor here is bracing: there is no Hegelian comfort for the nonphilosophical many under conditions of disenchantment.
The editorial project that makes this available is itself worthy of note. The Leo Strauss Transcript Series, anchored at the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss Center, publishes corrected transcripts based on remastered audio wherever possible, and explains the principles of editing (keeping oral texture, correcting grammar for readability, annotating persons, texts, and events). The headnote to this volume details the survival of the 1965 tapes, the fragmentary state of 1958 materials, and the policy of including citations to Hegel’s text as read in class. Franco’s team supplies lucid notes and an index that guide readers through the thicket of names and doctrines. The book, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019, thus secures not only a record of content but a model for how to present a teacher’s voice without domesticating it.
As a reading of Hegel’s political philosophy, the portrait that emerges is internally coherent. The rational state is the reconciliation of subjective freedom and objective order, borne by institutions that presume liberty in the economic sphere, protect personality in law, and are administered by a trained, conscientious civil service. Its traveling companions are sober: a monarch as formal head, a judiciary that does not bend to plebiscitary whim, and a political ethos wary of “liberalism” understood as the attempt to extend the rights of man directly into sovereignty without mediating forms.
Whether democracy must necessarily produce “agitation and unrest,” as Hegel suggests in the closing pages of The Philosophy of History, is a further question. Strauss notes that Hegel here hints at unresolved practical difficulties without conceding any theoretical defect in the idea that rationality and modernity coincide. The editor’s notes mark Strauss’s divergence from Collingwood on this point and underline the consistency with which Strauss reads Hegel as believing that, in decisive respects, the end has come.
Strauss’s own critique, then, is not that Hegel’s state is tyrannical, but that it lives on a moral capital it cannot replenish. Once religion is treated as optional ornament rather than as the central axis around which a people’s self-understanding turns, the social bond thins; and the substitution of philosophical insight cannot generalize. That is why the Kojèvian universal and homogeneous state appears, from Strauss’s vantage, as a final irony: a world where struggle ceases and recognition is secured arrives just as the depth conditions of human meaning dissolve. The transcript’s patient oscillation—sympathetic reconstruction, incisive doubt—makes this book far more fruitful than any summary polemic could be.
What especially recommends Leo Strauss on Hegel is the pedagogy it embodies. The seminar format is preserved: a student (often Mr. Reinken) reads; Strauss parses; digressions arise and are reabsorbed. Jokes happen, but as carefully placed relief in a difficult ascent; the tone is humane and exacting. Behind the informal surface one discerns a method: begin from the text, extract the strongest version of the claim, test it against experience and other first-rate thinkers, and never leap to verdicts that outrun understanding. In every respect Franco’s editorial interventions honor that method.
For scholars of Hegel, the volume demonstrates how to read the Philosophy of History without treating it as a deterministic myth. The dialectic is not a machine; it is a way of seeing how what peoples already revere, seek, and suffer can be comprehended as the unfolding of freedom under institutional forms. For scholars of Strauss, the book complicates any picture that would make him the simple antagonist of German idealism. He is a critic who learned from Hegel what many of Hegel’s acolytes forget: that the good, the beautiful, and the true do not automatically converge in the same social conditions, and that the ascent of knowledge may accompany the decline of civic vitality. It is precisely because he recognizes the scale of Hegel’s achievement that Strauss’s questions bite.
The achievement of this edition is to make available, in reliable and readable form, not a catechism of theses but a living encounter. One sees why Strauss chose the Philosophy of History: because Hegel “makes the history of political philosophy a form of political philosophy,” integrating empirical judgment with metaphysical claim, and because only from that angle can one take the measure of modernity’s ambition to render reason actual and thereby close the human story. Whether such closing is thinkable—or livable—remains the question that animates the course from its first session’s preliminary considerations to its final reflections on Reformation, Enlightenment, and Revolution. Franco’s curation secures that question for a new generation and frames it with the contexts and notes requisite for serious study.
As description in the strongest sense—a sustained act of philosophical exposition that neither domesticates nor caricatures—Leo Strauss on Hegel is an exemplary scholarly resource. It invites readers to watch a major twentieth-century political philosopher take Hegel’s measure, to see where he assents, where he suspends, and where he resists, and to inhabit, for the length of a course, a discipline of reading capable of renewing debates about modern liberty, the status of religion, the dignity of the person, the authority of science, and the fate of history. That the book can do so without condescension and without surrender is testimony both to Strauss’s craft as a teacher and to Franco’s care as an editor.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment