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ON TYRANNY |
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Leo Strauss
Alexandre Kojeve Preface and Acknowledgments On Tyranny, Leo Strauss's critical study of Xenophon's Hiero, was first published in 1948. A French edition appeared in 1954, which, in addition to Strauss's original study, included a French version of the Hiero, a slightly edited version of Alexandre Kojeve's important review of Strauss's study, and a "Restatement" by Strauss that briefly replies to a review by Professor Eric Voegelin and goes on to challenge Kojeve's review point by point. A volume containing essentially the same texts appeared in English in 1963. We are happy to be able to bring out a new edition of this now classic volume, enlarged by the full surviving correspondence between Strauss and Kojeve. We have taken the opportunity provided by this re-publication to correct various errors in the earlier edition, and to revise the translations. We are particularly grateful to Professor Seth Benardete for his careful review of the translation of the Hiero. The earlier version of Kojeve's "Tyranny and Wisdom" required such extensive revisions, that we for all intents and purposes re-translated it. We have restored the important concluding paragraph of Strauss's "Restatement" which appeared in the original French edition but was omitted from the subsequent American edition. Unfortunately we did not find a copy of Strauss's English-language original, and we therefore had to translate the published French translation of that paragraph. In our Introduction we chose to concentrate on the issues raised in the texts that are included in the present volume, and in particular on the debate between Strauss and Kojeve. Readers interested in the broader context of that debate will find it discussed more fully in Victor Gourevitch, "Philosophy and Politics," I-II, The Review of Metaphysics, 1968, 32: 58-84, 281-328; and in "The Problem of Natural Right and the Fundamental Alternatives in Natural Right and History," in The Crisis of Liberal Democracy, K. Deutsch and W. Soffer eds., SUNY Press, 1987, pp. 30-47; as well as in Michael Roth's Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegelin Twentieth Century France (Cornell 1988); and in "The Problem of Recognition: Alexandre Kojeve and the End of History," History and Theory, 1985, 24: 293-306. We have been reluctant to come between the reader and the texts, and have therefore kept editorial intrusions to a minimum. Unless otherwise indicated, they are placed between wedge-brackets: < >. Michael Roth found the Strauss letters among Kojeve's papers in the course of research for his Knowing and History. Kojeve's surviving letters to Strauss are preserved in the Strauss Archive of the University of Chicago Library. We wish to thank Nina Ivanoff, Kojeve's legatee, for permission to publish the Strauss letters, and Professor Joseph Cropsey, Executor of the Literary Estate of Leo Strauss, as well as the University of Chicago Archives, for permission to publish the Kojeve letters. We are also grateful to Mr. Laurence Berns for placing the photograph of Strauss at our disposal and to Nina Ivanoff for placing the photograph of Kojeve at our disposal. Victor Gourevitch transcribed, translated, and annotated the Correspondence, and wrote the Prefatory Note to it. We collaborated on the Introduction. V.G., M.S.R. Preface to the University of Chicago Edition We welcome this opportunity to restore the acknowledgment (unfortunately omitted from the first printing) of the efforts of Jenny Strauss Clay, George Elliot Tucker, Suzanne Klein, and Heinrich Meier in the early stages of transcribing Strauss's letters, and of the help Herbert A. Arnold and Krishna R. Winston gave us in reviewing portions of the translation of the correspondence. We are pleased to have been able to restore the concluding paragraph of Strauss's "Restatement" as he wrote it. Laurence Berns very kindly placed his copy of the English original at our disposal. We have corrected the typographical errors that vigilant readers were good enough to point out, and have brought some of the editorial notes up to date. V.G., M.S.R.
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