Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were two of the twentieth century's most influential and compelling political philosophers. Liisi Keedus explores how their shared background in Weimar Germany shaped their intellectual preoccupations, unravelling striking similarities, and genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.

Liisi Keedus is a research fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki. She is affiliated with Tallinn University and the Boccaccio Intellectual History Programme at the European University Institute, Florence.

Introduction; 1. The untimely generation; 2. The problem of politics in Arendt's and Strauss' early writings; 3. History and political understanding: an ambivalent symbiosis; 4. Liberalism and modernity: rethinking the question of the 'proud'; 5. Retrieving the problem of theoria and praxis: the antagonisms; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.