Here are some of the things that a reader of the press might know about Leo Strauss. Strauss, a political philosopher who died in 1973, is “the high priest of ultra conservatism” (the Guardian). His views on politics are “disturbingly elitist and antidemocratic,” full of warnings not to “let the rabble get above themselves” (the New York Times). He believed that “a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise” (the Guardian again). For such rulers, he taught, lying is not a sin, but a necessity: The leader should “use the language of morality to mask [his] real interests, which are his own survival in power and his ability to continue to exert dominance over the populace” (the Nation).

To join this elite that is beyond good and evil, the aspirant must submit wholly to Strauss, as to a cult leader: “surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss’s ideas” (the New York Review of Books). And some of the most powerful men in American government – all of them, like their guru, Jewish – have made that submission: “They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and the writers Robert Kagan and William Kristol” (the International Herald Tribune).

Turn to the Internet, that bargain basement of the collective unconscious, and you can see the way these cues from the mainstream press have been followed up. “Why Is Leo Strauss Running My Country?” demands one political blogger. In an interview on another site, Shadia Drury, a Canadian professor and the author of “Leo Strauss and the American Right,” informs readers that “the Straussian cabal in the [Bush] administration” lied about the real motivation for the invasion of Iraq,which was “reorganizing the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of Israel.” Search for Strauss’s name and one of the first results is a profile from the Lyndon LaRouche Web site, titled “Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons.”

Thus, in dismayingly few steps, the caricature of Strauss travels to the gutter. He is known to millions who have never read his books as a sinister Jewish mastermind; a man who stayed far from the spotlight, but exercised tremendous power behind the scenes; who believed in the right of the chosen few to dupe the innocent masses; and whose agents have secretly commandeered the government for the benefit of Israel. It is an image directly out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and in one guise or another it has become common currency on the left.

The anti-Semitism behind the current wave of Strauss hatred, like the anti-Semitism that drives so much talk about the neoconservative “cabal” in Washington, is barely even veiled. There is no mistaking the insolent glee with which some of his critics (or, better, his slanderers) associate Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, with the greatest enemies of the Jews. Tim Robbins, in his recent play “Embedded,” portrays characters based on Messrs. Wolfowitz and Perle shouting “Hail Leo Strauss,” in an echo of the Nazi salute. Last year, a BBC documentary called “The Power of Nightmares” compared Strauss to Sayyid Qutb, the ideological godfather of Hamas.

The demonization of Leo Strauss, in short, is one of the most dismal signs of the times. The shamelessness and baseness of much of what has been written about him is redolent of the propaganda of the 1930s, Auden’s “low, dishonest decade.” That is why “Reading Leo Strauss” (Chicago, 256 pages, $32.50), a sober new study by Yale professor Steven Smith, feels so heartening.By returning to the source and examining what Strauss actually wrote, Mr. Smith lets the breeze of reason into the feverish sickroom of ideology. He portrays a Strauss who cherished democracy as the best bulwark against tyranny, and who valued intellectual honesty above all. By the time Mr. Smith is done, nothing is left of the Strauss caricature except the ignorance and malice that fathered it.

“Reading Leo Strauss,” in turning from received opinion to the original texts, follows the characteristic movement of Strauss’s own work. Leo Strauss was born in Germany in 1899, part of the stellar last generation of German Jewish intellectuals; his contemporaries included Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin. In 1932, he joined the exodus of Jewish professors from Germany, moving first to England, then to America, where he taught in New York at the New School for Social Research. Finally, his career took him to the University of Chicago, where he produced the work for which he is best known and trained generations of exceptionally devoted students.

Much of the left’s ire against Strauss, in fact, has its origins in academic politics.”Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,” by Anne Norton, was widely praised when it appeared in 2004. But Ms. Norton’s critique of Strauss is really fueled by her grievance against the “Straussians,” his students and his students’ students, whom she accuses of bad manners, cliquishness, and arrogance. (The most famous Straussian was Allan Bloom, whose 1987 best seller, “The Closing of the American Mind” gave the school, if that is the right word, some prominence outside the academy.) Whether these charges are true or not, the Straussians surely have no monopoly on academic back-scratching and backbiting. And in any case, Strauss’s actual work cannot be judged on his students’ merits or demerits. As he himself wrote, with reference to Calvin and the Calvinists, “epigones … are very likely to miss the decisive point.”

What is the decisive point in Strauss’s own “teaching,” to use one of his favorite words? Mr. Smith’s title offers a good clue: As he says, “Strauss was, above all, a reader.” His work took the form not of a new philosophical system or a theory of politics but of very close readings of classic texts. Some of his most important books are commentaries: “Thoughts on Machiavelli,” “The Political Philosophy of Hobbes,” and “On Tyranny,” which examines a dialogue by Xenophon. In his best-known book, “Natural Right and History,” he examines the development of the idea of rights from Plato and Aristotle, through Hobbes and Locke, down to Rousseau and Burke.

But Strauss’s readings are not of merely antiquarian interest.What gives his work its stature and urgency is the way he turned to the wisdom of the past for guidance about the problems of the present. By asking what Plato or Machiavelli thought about tyranny, or the rights of man, or the place of morality in politics, he aimed to help his contemporaries think better about the health of liberal democracy and the challenge of totalitarianism. In a century when the Western political tradition seemed sick unto death, he went back to its origins, trying to trace its mistakes and expose its unexamined assumptions. In this sense, his approach to political philosophy is similar to that of Arendt, who also turned to the Greeks for guidance, and of Isaiah Berlin, who focused on the Enlightenment and its foes.

At the core of Strauss’s work is not a prescription but a diagnosis. Classical political philosophy, of the kind practiced by Plato and Aristotle, approached the problem of the best government by asking questions about human nature and virtue. That is why Plato’s “Republic” is built around a comparison of the city with the individual soul: He believed that we can only decide how society should be organized if we know what human beings need in order to flourish. Indeed, Strauss wrote, “each regime” – a favorite Strauss word, suggesting not just government but culture and society as well – “raises a claim, explicitly or implicitly,” about what kind of human life is best.

But beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes – pivotal figures for Strauss, whom he regards with a mixture of admiration and dismay – political philosophy changed its premises. Instead of virtues, it began to think about human beings as driven solely by needs – above all, the need to avoid violent death in the state of nature. In modern political philosophy, politics is no longer seen as a natural part of human life, as it was for Aristotle, but as a fatal necessity.

Yet this pessimism, paradoxically, increases philosophy’s expectations of what politics can do. After all, if a regime is something the human mind consciously devises, then it is theoretically capable of being perfected, like any other machine. In a well-engineered society, there would be no more conflict: This is the principle that animates Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx in their different ways. Thus the nihilism of modern thought leads directly to its utopianism, with the disastrous consequences that Strauss lived to witness.

It is only on the basis of this justifiably dark view of the modern world that one can understand Strauss’s more controversial, and more easily distorted, teachings. The most notorious of these are his ideas about secrecy, or lying. But the actual role of secrecy in Strauss’s work will come as a surprise to those who only know the press caricature. For Strauss did not say that it was justified for great men to lie in the pursuit of their goals. As Mr. Smith writes firmly, “He did not sanction the selective use of lies in public life, as has been asserted.” Nor does he lie about his own beliefs in order to cloak a nefarious anti-democratic purpose, an idea that would have repelled him: “The political philosopher,” he wrote, “is primarily interested in, or attached to, the truth.”

The importance of secrecy, for Strauss, was a matter of history and hermeneutics. In reading classic texts, he argued, we have to remember that their authors often lived in authoritarian societies governed by religious dogma. In such times and places, from ancient Greece to Puritan England, the philosopher’s commitment to truth meant that he inevitably came into conflict with the idols of the tribe.

To avoid the fate of Socrates – the founder of political philosophy, who was put to death by the Athenians – such thinkers wrote with deliberate caution. Machiavelli and Hobbes, for example, did not lie about their real views – if they did, how could posterity ever learn what those views were? – but expressed them indirectly, so that only the skillful, patient reader could fully grasp them. In Strauss’s words, they were “driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests.”

This understanding of the classic philosophers helps to explain why Strauss reads them so very carefully, assuming that no feature of their work – no pattern, self-contradiction, or allusion – can be brushed aside as accidental. It also explains the originality – at times, the perversity – of his interpretations. But in no way can Strauss’s hermeneutics of suspicion be reduced to a belief in the “noble lie,” as so many propagandists have claimed. Rather, what Strauss really teaches is the importance of being a good reader, of mastering an author’s nuances, of being alert to textual devices and conventions. (Ironically, this is just the kind of reading his own work fails to receive from his enemies.) In a literary critic, all this would be utterly uncontroversial; only in the context of political philosophy can it be made to appear sinister.

Is there some secret message at the heart of Strauss’s own work? Here, again, the answer is no. What there is, rather, is an uncertainty – the kind of uncertainty shared by the most penetrating and sincere modern thinkers. For while Strauss recognizes the catastrophic effects of modern nihilism and relativism, he is too honest to believe they can simply be bypassed, like a ditch in the road. Like the rest of us, he too lives in a world shorn of transcendent authority, a world where “the more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism.”

In such a world, even the best human societies seem fragile, resting on little more than habit and convention.And it is precisely because Strauss believed American democracy was one of those best societies that he hesitated to undermine it with loud declarations of doubt. As Mr. Smith puts it

Strauss did write cautiously and reticently, especially with regard to the American regime, but certainly not to conceal some sinister intent. He did not write for the sake of undermining democracy, restoring ancient hierarchies, or advocating policies of imperial expansion – all accusions that have been leveled against him – but for the purpose of protecting the regime from the corrosive blasts of skepticism that philosophy necessarily effects on any body of received opinion.

Strauss’s sense of the fragility of democracy, reinforced by his experiences in Weimar Germany, did not make him an enemy of democracy. Just the reverse: It made him aware of the tragic vulnerability of modern liberalism, whose commitment to freedom and complexity makes it tempting prey for the unfree and the uncomplex. This awareness, as Mr. Smith writes, is what links Strauss with the great “cold-war liberals of his generation – Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Walter Lippmann, Raymond Aron.” Like them, Strauss taught that liberalism has real enemies, and that moral judgments are inescapable in political life. The real question today is not why this message has important admirers. It is why so many self-proclaimed liberals are so unwilling to hear it that they would rather stop up their ears with lies and hatred.

akirsch@nysun.com