Leo Strauss and the Dangers of Postmodernism

According to the late Leo Strauss, some of the West’s greatest devotees of philosophical truth and reason encoded their beliefs in hints, irony, and deliberate self-contradiction, interpretable only by those initiated into the art of esoteric reading. In Philosophy between the Lines, Arthur Melzer musters empirical evidence that, from Plato to Montesquieu, central Western thinkers really did employ that method of writing. Commenting on the implications of Melzer’s analysis for today’s academic infatuation with postmodernism, deconstruction, and cultural relativism, Francis Fukuyama writes: