1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 The reception of Leo Strauss in Northeast Asia Jun-Hyeok Kwak Prologue In Northeast Asia, public interest in Leo Strauss and his political philosophy has been rapidly declining in recent times. This is certainly a surprising phenom- enon, particularly in China where Strauss’s popularity underwent a tremendous increase during the emergence of neoconservatism in the United States a decade ago. However, “Straussian hermeneutics” is still regarded as an important method of interpretation by scholars in the feld of the history of political philo- sophy. And the key issues underlying the methodological premises of Straussian hermeneutics, such as the problem of modernity, attract sincere scholars and stimulate scholarly debates. Furthermore, we observe that some intellectuals in Northeast Asia present “Straussianism” as a sort of sinister cult, and show animosity toward scholars who identify themselves as “Straussians.” This aca- demic atmosphere indicates that the recent decline of public interest in Strauss in Northeast Asia can be considered as nothing but a trend that drifts along with the fuctuation of public interest in sociopolitical issues. As a matter of fact, the recent decline of public interest in Leo Strauss thor- oughly invalidates the cogency of the currently dominant approach to the reception of Strauss in Northeast Asia. Most of the scholarly works on the reception of Strauss in Northeast Asia are interwoven with the question that Mark Lilla once addressed in his magazine article (Lilla 2010): “Why is Leo Strauss popular in China?” With an idiosyncratic suspicion about the reception of Strauss in North- east Asia, they stress the immense surge of scholarly interest in Strauss in the past but they pay far less attention to the ongoing philosophical appropriations of Strauss and his political ideas in recent times. Disclosing the selective adaptations of Strauss’s political ideas, some scholars have endeavored to examine the recent decline of “Strauss fever” in China (Shaw 2017; Kroll 2017). However, they do not go beyond what Mark Lilla foreshadowed vaguely with the word “strangeness” in the reception of Strauss in China. In other words, they do not pay due considera- tion to the scholarly readings of Strauss in Northeast Asia and their ingenuity in the sense of philosophical appropriation across cultures. What they consciously or unconsciously intend to uncover is the Chinese or Northeast Asian cultural and sociopolitical contexts that provide the rationales for the selective adaptations. 1 Introduction * In Leo Strauss in Northeast Asia, edited by Jun-Hyeok Kwak & Sungwoo Park (Routledge, 2019).