Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru of American neoconservatives, reviewed Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, which I recently discussed here, in the 8:1/4 (1941) issue of Social Research, the journal of the New School of Social Research where Strauss taught and where the Troskyist trend that became neoconservatism had its genesis.
Strauss frames Löwith's book as a description of "the emergence of European, and in particular of German, nihilism." This is, at best, an imaginative way to construe Von Hegel zu Nietzsche.
Its subject, he writes, "may be said to be the transformation of European humanism, as exemplified by Goethe and Hegel, into German nihilism, as exemplified by Ernst Jünger." Actually, Löwith says very little about 20th century philosophy or the historical trends leading to Jünger's rightwing militarist sentiments and his nihilistic literary work.
Tags: karl löwith, leo strauss, nietzsche, von hegel zu nietzsche
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