Alexandra Homolar Neoconservatism and the Strauss Connection Introduction 1 New intellectual movements often seek legitimacy by laying claim to the intellectual inheritance of earlier thinkers. The rise in the political influ- ence of contemporary neoconservatives during the administration of US president George W. Bush revived interest in neoconservative thought, and stimulated renewed controversy over the intellectual roots of neoconservatism in the work of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish émigré who taught at the University of Chicago between 1949 and 1967. Some neoconservatives as well as their critics have claimed that Strauss — whose adversaries described him as a foe of modernity and enlightenment as well as an anti-democrat, while admirers portrayed him as a crusader against inhumanity — is the intellectual father of the ‘neoconservative persuasion’ (Anastaplo, 1999: 5–7; Smith, 2006: 2–3, 12, 87; Kauffmann, 1997: 28–30, Zuckert and Zuckert, 2006: 3–20). Others have argued that neoconservative ideas ‘show little influence of and certainly do not derive from Strauss’s political thinking’ (Zuckert and Zuckert, 2006: 266). Through focusing on the reinterpretation of morality in neoconservative thought, this chapter demonstrates that both views are only partly correct. Neoconservatism is an attitude, tendency, or persuasion. Despite the conventional wisdom in much of contemporary International Relations scholarship, it is neither a homogeneous school of thought nor a unified intellectual movement (Wilson, 1980: 509; I. Kristol, 2003; 1995: 40). For example, while the original neoconservatives shared the common experi- 1 I have benefited from remarks of the participants of the conference The Legacy of Leo Strauss, Nottingham, March 2006 as well as of the BISA United States Foreign Policy Working Group conference, London, September 2008. I also wish to thank André Broome, Tony Burns, Richard King, Timothy Lynch, and Douglas Murray for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter.