Know Your Enemy - Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (w/ Matt Dinan)

Matt and Sam talk to Matt Dinan about Leo Strauss's 1953 book, Natural Right & History.

Duration: 2h 26m
Broadcast on: 09 Jun 2026
Audio Format: other

Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink! For the third installment in our occasional series on important conservative books, or important books written by or embraced by conservatives, we take up Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, based on his 1949 Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago (where he taught for two decades) and published in 1953. To help us, we called on our friend Matt Dinan, a political theorist who's associate professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. If you've listened to previous episodes and wanted us to go deeper on Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who came to the United States after fleeing Nazism, "Straussianism," and what they might have to do with American conservatism and our present political moment, here you go.

After offering some background on Strauss and the context of Natural Right and History's publication, we discuss Strauss's patriotic appeal to Americans in the book's introduction, walk listeners through the chapters that follow (explaining what "natural right" is and why it's paired with "history" in the title along the way), and close out by exploring Strauss's ambiguous relationship to American conservatism—and more!

Sources:

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953)

— On Tyranny (1963)

— Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1965)

Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (1952)

James W. Ceaser, "The American Context of Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History," Perspectives on Political Science, Spring 2008

Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (2011)

— "On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss's 'Natural Right and History' as Response to Heidegger," The Review of Politics, Spring 2008

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 137 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippen, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam Edo Bell, who I spent so much time with recording this conversation, as well as our guest Matt Dynan. Hello, Samuel. Hi, Matt. This one is a barn burner. It's a doozy. Yes. Two and a half hours about Leo Strauss's natural right in history. And because the episode is so long, this will be a very short intro. Yeah, we shouldn't dwell. But this episode, I imagine, is going to be beloved by the super nerds in the audience. I really think you will not hear, on any other podcast, a more detailed or compelling walk through the paces of this extraordinarily interesting and challenging book. For a better or worse, you won't hear this anywhere else. There might be a reason you won't hear it anywhere else. Yes, we are pushing the podcast format to the absolute limits of what it can contain. Oh, but it was so fun. That's what this is what it's all about for me. This was classic Know Your Enemy shit. Yes. Just to wrap my head around these arguments and talk about them with you and Matt Dynan, who is so brilliant, I had so much fun. Yes, listeners, this is the third, actually, in our occasional series of episodes dedicated to important or at least illustrative books written by conservatives or, in some cases, perhaps this one, adopted by conservatives more than produced by one of their own. And remember, our first in this series was Christopher Caldwell's 2020 book, The Age of Entitlement, America Since the 60s. Our second, back in October, was Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960 to 2010. And for this episode, we're going back further, much further, in fact, to Leo Strauss's 1953 book, Natural Writing History, based on his 1949 Walgreen Lectures. It's a challenging read. It's dense, but fascinating and such a pleasure. And we get into all of it. And our guests for this episode, as we mentioned, is Matt Dynan. You might remember him from the episode we did on kind of AI, teaching, learning, reading, great books back, I believe that came out in late December or early January. And he is the associate professor in the great books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. He's a political theorist. I love Matt. He's so smart and interesting and a friend of mine and friend of the pod, as we say, we called him The Big Guns for this episode because it was such a dense book that we needed a little help. Yeah. He's like a philosophizing machine. He just set him off and he'll go, which I love. And just to give the smallest sneak peek of where this episode caches out, one of the

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Matt and Sam talk to Matt Dinan about Leo Strauss's 1953 book, Natural Right & History.