We saw in chapter 7 the intimate connection between Strauss's and Levinas's respective views of Zionism and the development of their mature conceptions of politics. In this chapter, we turn to the deep-seated connection between their respective conceptions of politics and their shared attempt to retrieve the true meaning of classical Jewish texts (albeit different ones). Among readers of Strauss, no issue is as hotly contested as his contentions about esotericism. Strauss's contentions about authorial meaning are often taken, for better or for worse, as elitist if not authoritarian and dogmatic claims. In contrast, Levinas's hermeneutic claim for an originary ethical moment is often taken as, to use Levinas's own terminology, an opening to the “other.” Far from being considered authoritarian, Levinas's hermeneutic presupposition is often considered a lone moral stance in a sea of violent appropriations of “the other.”

I argue in this chapter that the opposite is the case. Rather than presenting an authoritarian impulse, Strauss's view of esotericism is profoundly antidogmatic and open to other voices – and certainly far more so than Levinas's so-called ethical hermeneutic is. To begin to appreciate this claim, it is helpful to recall Strauss's comment to Voeglin, quoted in Chapter 7, that “the root of all modern darkness from the seventeenth century on is the obscuring of the difference between theory and praxis, an obscuring that first leads to a reduction of praxis to theory (this is the meaning of so-called rationalism) and then, in retaliation, to the rejection of theory in the name of praxis that is no longer intelligible as praxis.”