The "Morality" of the Political. Leo Strauss as a Reader of Carl Schmitt

This essay analyses the "Notes on the Concept of the Political" that Leo Strauss wrote in 1932 as a commentary on the Begriff des Politischen by Carl Schmitt. The first part briefly expounds Strauss's main thesis concerning Schmitt's work - Carl Schmitt proposes "a liberalism with the opposite polarity" - while the second part discusses this thesis, in an attempt to show that the distance between Schmitt and Strauss is far more radical than it might seem. The conclusion is that while Strauss tries to recover the submerged roots of modern liberalism that can be found in the classical rationalism of ancient liberalism, Carl Schmitt instead does not belong to the liberal tradition at all, not even according to the modality of an "opposite polarity".