When Leo Strauss died in 1973 he was virtually unknown outside the tiny academic circle that he inhabited. Forty years later his name and influence are known almost everywhere. His books and articles have been translated into nearly every European language and several Asian ones. Web sites — both pro and con — are devoted to him. International conferences debate his thought and legacy.

Like all serious teachers, Strauss developed followers, and like all disciples these have split over the meaning of their teacher’s work. Was Strauss on the side of the ancients or the moderns? Was he a defender of biblical revelation or philosophical rationality? Was he, as he often said, a “friend of liberal democracy” or its most severe critic? What we are experiencing, to cite Harry V. Jaffa’s witty paraphrase of Lincoln, is nothing less than a “crisis of the Strauss divided.”

Jaffa is almost single-handedly the creator of what has become known as West Coast Straussianism, so called because its epicenter is Claremont McKenna College in California. At the core of the West Coast doctrine is the study of the American regime, a topic to which Strauss devoted little explicit attention, but to which Jaffa and his followers have given primacy. The West Coasters have created a synthesis of Strauss’s defense of the classical doctrine of natural right — the view that there is a single immutable standard of justice — with the wisdom of the American founding fathers, supplemented by Lincoln and Churchill (recently names like Calvin Coolidge and Clarence Thomas have been added to the list). Contra Strauss, the West Coasters have developed their own theory of American exceptionalism, arguing that the framers uniquely combined features of classical prudence with biblical morality.

“Crisis of the Strauss Divided” consists of 19 essays, the most revealing of which is the semi-autobiographical “Straussian Geography.” Here Jaffa describes his early education as an English major at Yale, where, he says, he “read nothing but good books,” but adds that his real education began only after meeting Strauss, a ­German-Jewish émigré, at the New School for Social Research in the years around World War II. Jaffa describes this meeting as a conversion experience. “Saul on the road to Damascus was not more stunned, nor more transformed than I,” he writes. Almost 70 years after their first encounter, Jaffa is still able to speak about it with a combination of boyish enthusiasm and a convert’s zeal.