One of Leo Strauss’s most profound and least appreciated insights was that the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues anticipated today’s postmodernists by thousands of years. It may shock even seasoned readers of CRB to learn that Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and their intellectual grandfather, Martin Heidegger, were not entirely wrong. But their key insight—that all the things we think we know are influenced by what our community tells us is true and important—was one Plato also understood, according to Strauss.

The ancient analogue of postmodernism was the pre-Socratic notion that “whirl is king”—i.e., that the human parameters of truth are constantly in flux as power changes hands and perspectives shift. Like the postmodernists, Plato saw the force of this argument. Unlike them, he endeavored to go beyond it. Strauss found in the dialogues a sustained effort to answer pre-Socratics like Heraclitus by identifying a stable basis for enduring truth. And so, as Strauss wrote to the Heideggerian Gerhard Krüger in 1932, “Modern philosophy, taken to its conclusion, seems to me to lead to the point at which Socrates begins.”

Observations like this help show just how original and radical an intellect Strauss possessed. His work is rich enough to justify the appearance of two new volumes that might otherwise seem to