389 Leo Strauss is famous for his recovery of classical political philosophy. This does not initially bespeak a friend of democracy. As he himself succinctly puts it, “To speak first of the classics’ attitude toward democracy, the premises: ‘the classics are good’ and ‘democracy is good’ do not validate the conclusion ‘hence the classics were good democrats.’ It would be silly to deny that the classics rejected democracy as an inferior kind of regime. They were not blind to its advantages . . . . [But] the classics rejected democracy because they thought that the aim of human life, and hence of social life, is not freedom but virtue.” 1 There are to be sure, as he frequently noted, differences between classical democracy, which was, owing to economic scarcity, inevitably the rule of the poor and hence the uneducated, and modern democracy, which has far more abundance and which is structured toward greater abundance. Yet modern democracy, which Strauss considered the most decent of the available modern regimes, suffers from a new malady: it is “mass democracy,” and as such stands in need of an educa- tion that “broadens and deepens” the soul—the very type of education that its dynamic economy of plenty threatens to destroy. Strauss disagreed, moreover, with a number of his prominent contemporaries, some of them friends—Krüger, Löwith, Voegelin— on the secularization thesis, according to which modern democracy embodied the historically disclosed “truth” of Christianity, the secular manifestation of an advanced moral consciousness recognizing the equal dignity of each individual. He argued that modern democracy emerged, rather, through the modern philosophic-scientific project, and has therefore within it the very serious threat to humanity that is posed by technology. In fact, he goes on to argue, after the passage I have quoted, that “the difference between the classics and us with regard to democracy consists exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology.” The classics foresaw that “the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control . . . would lead to disaster or to the dehumanization of man.” 2 It is this concern that predominates in Strauss’s analysis of modern democracy. What this concern means begins to become clear in a sketch of the evolution of modern liberal democracy, in its resemblance to and its difference from the classical Chapter 25 Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education Timothy Burns