[Leo Strauss] was raised in an orthodox Jewish home and also studied at a Gymnasium in nearby Marburg where he received a broad humanistic education. At the age of seventeen Strauss became a devoted advocate of political Zionism.
…Strauss’s fourth book, On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s “Hiero,” was published in 1948. Whereas the dominant reading of Plato’s Republic understands Plato to be advocating that philosophers should rule, Strauss argues that Plato actually viewed such a situation as untenable since it would require the consent of non-philosophers, the unwise.
… in recent years, Strauss has been accused of being the intellectual godfather of the neo-conservative political movement and thus of being the intellectual force behind the Bush administration’s plan to invade of Iraq. Second, no aspect of Strauss’s work is as hotly contested as his claims about esotericism. Interpretations of Strauss’s view of esotericism include: that Strauss advocates clandestine cabals with secrets imparted from teacher to disciple; that Strauss’s writings are themselves esoteric documents; that Strauss thinks that all thinkers write esoterically; that Strauss claims to know a secret; that, Strauss promoted mass deception and perpetual war; and that, in one particularly crude rendering, Strauss used his esoteric methods to hide his fascist sympathies, if not his secret Nazism.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
