But, Strauss suggested, there are problems inherent in these views; one way to understand these problems better is to look to the past. Around the time of Machiavelli, Strauss argued, something profound began to change in politics and philosophy. Different ideas about humanity were developing, some encouraged by the growing power of science and an increasing faith in the ability of reason to transform the world, others by the dismantling of old hierarchies and the development of democracy. Notions of human progress and political evolution took root.

While some of these ideas, no doubt, transformed the world for the better, some — about the perfectibility of humanity and the ability to transform the world — ended up as the handmaidens of 20th-century tyranny. Strauss was wary. "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy," he wrote, "precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy."

As a kind of remedy, Strauss was engaged in trying to synthesize the worlds of the ancient and the modern. But how? What, he asked, were the ancients saying? What was said about justice in Plato or faith in Maimonides? The answers are more difficult to discern than it seems. Strauss argued that premodern philosophers, like Plato or Maimonides, who worried about persecution, presented their ideas in costumed form, cloaking dangerous truths so that they could be discerned only by "trustworthy and intelligent readers."

Could anything seem less democratic? Here was Strauss, saying that the knowledge of the ancients was essential to the future development of democracy, that contemporary understandings of warfare and politics would be seriously limited without that philosophical perspective and that an elite was required to interpret that perspective. Moreover, the ancients' immutable truths, when finally discerned, had nothing to do with democratic consensus and culture; indeed, they often could seem incompatible with them.

The self-righteous fury unleashed against Leo Strauss is partly because of the sense that he sinned against one of the most sacred doctrines of democratic culture: egalitarianism.

But in the end Strauss's message does get through. What the ancients remind us is that humanity is not infinitely perfectible, that the ideal world is not ruled by reason alone, that cultural and historical variation does not mean that anything goes, that notions of egalitarianism do not guarantee virtue.

These views can sound almost trite, reduced to such propositions. But consider, then, how few societies in the past have explored such far-reaching conclusions, how few have also been able to live by them, and how much opposition such views have spurred.