The City and Man

The book's central argument is that classical political philosophy, properly understood, provides a standard of natural right capable of judging the crisis of modern thought—the descent into historicism and ideology [citation:5]. The three essays on Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides are not separate studies but a unified inquiry into the 'city and man.' Aristotle's Politics is the starting point because it articulates the common-sense understanding of the polis as a natural association ordered toward the good life [citation:6]. Plato's Republic shows that the best regime exists only 'in speech,' and Thucydides' History reveals the limits of political life under the pressure of war and necessity [citation:18].

Strauss begins with Aristotle because the Politics provides the 'common-sense' or 'first for us' account of the city. Aristotle shows that the polis is natural, that it is the association in which human beings can achieve their highest end, and that political philosophy begins from the opinions of citizens about the good life and the good society [citation:6]. Without this initial clarification of the polis—what it is and what claims it makes—the later discussions of the best regime in Plato and the moral ambiguities of Thucydides would lack a stable foundation. Strauss's order is thus pedagogic and philosophic at once [citation:2].

The best regime is the political order that is best 'always and everywhere' by nature, the standard by which all actual regimes are judged [citation:8]. Strauss insists that it exists only in speech because no actual city can fully realize the demands of justice without corruption; the best regime is a theoretical construction, not a blueprint for practical politics [citation:18]. This is crucial to his argument against ideological politics: the philosopher does not seek to impose the best regime on existing cities, because the philosophical life transcends the political life, and the best regime 'comes to sight only as the limit of the political' [citation:18].

Strauss treats Thucydides not merely as a historian but as a moral and political thinker whose History reveals the permanent problems of political life—the tension between justice and necessity, the fragility of civic virtue under the pressure of war, and the limits of reason in the conduct of nations [citation:1]. The essay on Thucydides brings history into the orbit of philosophy, showing that the historian's account of the Peloponnesian War contains a philosophic teaching about the city and human nature. Thucydides thus completes the inquiry by showing what the polis looks like when it is most tested [citation:17].

The City and Man is closely linked to Natural Right and History (1953), which diagnosed the crisis of modern political thought and called for a return to classical natural right. Where Natural Right and History proceeds from the moderns to the ancients, The City and Man reverses the order, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Thucydides [citation:2]. The book is also an enlarged version of the Page-Barbour Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1962, and it represents Strauss's mature engagement with the classical texts that shaped his conception of political philosophy [citation:11].

The title's 'and' is often read as a simple conjunction, but Strauss intends it as both a disjunction and a conjunction, echoing the Socratic dialectic that both separates and pairs things [citation:2]. 'City and man' gestures toward the tension and interdependence between the political community and the human being who transcends it. The book is not a treatise on urban life or a study of 'man' in the abstract; it is an inquiry into the relation between the polis and the philosophic life, and into the question of how the two can coexist without the city destroying the philosopher or the philosopher corrupting the city.