AsDanaVilla and StevenSmith showin their essays,Arendt and Strauss both
thought it necessary to return to the ancient Greeks in order to recapture amore
original, but forgottenunderstanding ofpolitics andphilosophy.3 But,where her
own activities on behalf of her own people led Arendt to conclude that the vita
activa needed to be freed from its subordination to the vita contemplativa, which
had began with Plato, Strauss tried to revive the understanding of philosophyas
away of life that Plato had depicted in Socrates. That philosophy not only began
with an examination of the political opinions of Socrates’ contemporaries, but it
also took politics as the model of the comprehensive view the philosopher
sought of the whole. According to Strauss, there was, nevertheless, an irreducible
tension between the essentially open and inquiring character of the philosophical
search for wisdom and the necessarily closed horizon of the city. This
tension was not as fundamental, however, as the opposition between reason
and revelation concerning both the character and grounds of truth andmorality