Political Theology as Way of Life

by Alex Priou

Photo: Süleyman Argun via Flickr

By chance this past January found me working on Leo Strauss’s “What Is Political Philosophy?” while sojourning in Jerusalem. It just so happens that it was “in this city, and in this land,” “on this sacred soil” and bearing “what Jerusalem stands for” ever in mind, that some seventy years earlier Strauss had originally delivered this essay as three lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The cause of my situation was twofold. First, I had spent the first five days of January teaching the essay as part of the University of Austin’s yearly Symposium on Leo Strauss. I was also scheduled to deliver a paper in early February at Notre Dame’s Political Theory Colloquium. For the latter occasion, I had decided to prepare my own commentary on Strauss’s text, to be submitted for review toward the end of the month. So it happened that my January was to be entirely devoted to reading, teaching, interpreting, and writing on Strauss’s piece. The second cause was an invitation from my friend Titus Techera to join a group of academic and media-adjacent people for a study tour of Israel, with a focus on Jewish history and Israeli politics, scheduled for about a week between my return from Austin and the submission of my paper to the colloquium. January thus became overwhelmingly busy. Sensing the urgency of the situation, I hurried to write the paper as quickly as I could while still in Austin, up until the tour began, but my commentary on Strauss quickly ballooned, so that it was looking more and more like I was going to produce a short book rather than a long essay. Restricting myself to Strauss’s first lecture helped somewhat, but it quickly became evident that I would still have to spend some of my time in Jerusalem working on “What Is Political Philosophy?” Such was indeed the case: in the early mornings and late evenings, or while riding around the country by bus, I found the occasional hour to read Strauss, write my notes on his text, read related materials from Spinoza to Swift and beyond, and outline the remaining paragraphs of my essay. So did the world find me.

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