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Book Review: Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn3 5 5cautious and prudential defense of enlightened despotism), but the ultimatelogic of that alternative, which Jacobi so insisted on, led to places Mendelssohn,very understandably, did not want to go. In a certain way, therefore,Strauss’s working through of Mendelssohn’s situation was a rehearsal for hisconfrontation with American liberalism, so humane, so well-meaning, andso incapable, in fact if not necessarily in theory, of defending itself intellectually,perhaps most importantly, after Strauss’s death, against what came to becalled “postmodernism.”If the climax and central significance of this book is the Pantheist Controversy,Strauss’s introductions to earlier Mendelssohn works should not beneglected. Briefly, they are models of what introductions should be. Historicalquestions are raised and judged (who, for instance, is really the author of Popea Metaphysician!—Lessing or Mendelssohn? [7–13]). But the intellectual issueat stake is also clarified—what was the issue between the followers of Leibnizand the Berlin Academy? And at times, where Mendelssohn gives himselfaway, Strauss is there to notice, as in the former’s incapacity to understandjust how radical Rousseau is (14–17). The introduction to Mendelssohn’sversion of the Phaedo, in which he seeks to defend the doctrine of the immortalityof the soul on the grounds of modern metaphysics, is worth a good dealof attention, which it will not get from me here. Suffice it to say that here tooone can see Mendelssohn’s decent and humane sentiments come up againstthe necessities of philosophic argument, and emerge bruised but fundamentallyunaffected. Strauss’s gifts as a careful reader are displayed graphically,in a table showing the significance of certain changes Mendelssohn makesin Plato’s text (38). All of them point to Mendelssohn’s softness and evenhis sentimentality. (As an aside, this observation: Strauss is known generallyas a careful and deeply insightful reader of great philosophers, whosetexts contain riddles that in some cases only he has fathomed. Here we see,very instructively, Strauss reading a thinker of the second rank. It turns outthat in some ways this is even harder, because it is necessary to bring intoclarity exactly what the confusion is that escaped the author. An examplecan be found in Strauss’s tenth introduction, to God’s Cause, or ProvidenceVindicated, which works out in remarkable complexity and clarity the relationof Mendelssohn’s thought to Leibniz and Leibniz’s to Bayle, culminatingin a deadly judgment on page 154, one which demonstrates in a nutshell howStrauss saw the difference between the sobriety of the great philosophers andthe sentimentality of a thinker who wasn’t.)