Strauss argued that pre-modern philosophers—from Plato to medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers to early moderns like Spinoza—deliberately hid their most radical teachings beneath a surface of conventional piety and orthodoxy. They did so to avoid persecution by religious and political authorities, but also because they believed that the truth is dangerous for the many and should be reserved for the philosophically mature. Strauss developed a method of reading between the lines, attending to contradictions, silences, and excessive emphases, to recover the original meaning of classical texts. This method has revolutionized the history of political philosophy and remains highly influential in both Straussian and academic circles.

Rawls and Nozick are modern liberal philosophers who construct normative theories of justice using abstract rational arguments and hypothetical contracts. Strauss, by contrast, sees the core task of political philosophy as understanding the permanent questions of human existence—the best regime, the nature of justice, the tension between philosophy and politics—by recovering the original intentions of the great thinkers. He rejects the historicist assumption that each age has its own truth, insisting that nature and right are trans-historical. He also argues that modern liberalism, by abandoning natural right and embracing relativism, has undermined its own foundations and opened the door to nihilism.

Strauss traces the crisis of modernity to the break with classical natural right initiated by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, who substituted subjective human desires and rights for objective natural teleology. This shift led to historicism, positivism, and relativism, which deny that there are permanent standards of justice. For Strauss, the modern project, despite its technological and material achievements, has lost sight of the question of the best way of life, reducing politics to the satisfaction of desires. The crisis is manifested in the erosion of moral and political foundations, the rise of ideology, and the inability of liberal democracy to defend itself against its enemies. He calls for a recovery of the ancient wisdom that grounds politics in virtue and philosophy.

Strauss trained a remarkable cohort of students at Chicago, including Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Cropsey, and Harry V. Jaffa, who went on to shape political science and public discourse. Several Straussians became influential in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations—most notably Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, and Richard Perle—leading to the perception that Strauss was a founder of neoconservatism. This is contested: Strauss himself was not a policy advocate and was skeptical of mass democracy, but his students applied his critique of relativism to confront communism and Islamism. The Strauss–neoconservative link is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate, with some arguing that his emphasis on noble lies and regime change was distorted by his followers.

Strauss was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany and faced the challenge of modern Judaism and the Enlightenment. He engaged deeply with medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly Maimonides, and with the 'Jewish Question'—whether Jews could be fully integrated into modern liberal societies. His early work on Spinoza and his critique of the Enlightenment's critique of religion shaped his lifelong concern with the tension between reason and revelation. He ultimately argued that the opposition between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (revelation) is the deepest conflict in human life, and that both are legitimate but irreconcilable alternatives. This framework gave his political philosophy a distinctive existential and theological depth.

A widespread error is to think that Strauss was a conservative ideologue who endorsed esoteric writing to justify elite manipulation of the masses. In fact, Strauss was a liberal democrat who believed that the best practical regime is modern liberal democracy, though he recognized its flaws. He did not advocate hiding truths to deceive but to protect philosophy and to enable the careful reader to understand the deepest questions. He also did not reject modern science or liberalism wholesale; he sought to recover classical principles to strengthen them. His aim was philosophical understanding, not political activism. The simplification of his thought as a cipher for neoconservatism obscures his subtle and often skeptical character.

Strauss rejected the common view that Plato's dialogues are straightforward expositions of doctrine. Instead, he treated them as dramatic works, where the form—the characters, setting, and dramatic action—is as important as the arguments. He argued that Plato wrote for different audiences, with surface arguments for the many and deeper teachings for the few. His reading of the *Republic* reveals tensions and contradictions that point to Socratic irony and the limits of political idealism. Similarly, his interpretation of Xenophon's *Education of Cyrus* shows a ruthless Machiavellian prince hidden beneath the surface of a virtuous ruler. This literary-philosophical approach has been both praised as deeply insightful and criticized as overly speculative.