Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation » (Reissue)

Leora Batnitzky is Asssociate Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered and editor of the forthcoming Martin Buber: Schriften zur Philosophie und Religion. She is co-editor of Jewish Studies Quarterly.

Leora Batnitzky brings together two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that their projects had many parallels.

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Preface;

Part I. Philosophy:

1. Strauss and Levinas between Athens and Jerusalem;
2. Levinas's defense of modern philosophy: how Strauss might respond;

Part II. Revelation:
3. 'Freedom depends upon its bondage': the shared debt to Franz Rosenzweig;
4. An irrationalist rationalism: Levinas's transformation of Hermann Cohen;
5. The possibility of pre-modern rationalism: Strauss's transformation of Hermann Cohen;

Part III. Politics:
6. Against utopia: law and its limits;
7. Zionism and the discovery of prophetic politics;
8. Politics and hermeneutics: Strauss's and Levinas's retrieval of classical Jewish sources;
9. Revelation and commandment;
10. Concluding thoughts: progress or return?; Notes; References; Index.