Against public philosophy

Why Leo Strauss considers it dangerous. For the twentieth-century thinker, public life was muddied by opinion and persecution, so philosophers should shield their work from view. But why did Strauss mistrust the public? Writer and historian Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft explores how the answers lie in his political and intellectual experiences, which influenced his critique of the public and led him to view philosophy as an unpolitical practice, “always endangered by, and endangering, public life and public politics.”