Leo Strauss

German-American political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born to Jewish parents and later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.

Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy and encouraging the application of those ideas to contemporary political theory.

He became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1951, Strauss apparently coined the phrase "reductio ad Hitlerum", when he used it in an article he wrote.

He died from pneumonia on 18 October 1973, aged 74, in Annapolis, Maryland.