One of the things that Leo Strauss does quite well, as a writer, which I never really noticed before, is that when he rehearses the arguments of others—what we today would call a lit review—he provides a genuine sense of drama to his account. That is, lit reviews are often the occasion, in our academic literature, for showing the reader that you have done your due diligence as a scholar or for offering an account of what everyone else gets wrong, thereby setting yourself up for giving to the reader what’s right, what’s correct, what’s true.

Strauss doesn’t do that. Or he doesn’t do that in an obvious way. Instead, though he disagrees with all the other accounts that he’s summarizing, and though he is ultimately setting himself, and you, the reader, up for what he is about to do, he also gives you a sense of going on a journey. Going through the other accounts is necessary for you to get to where he is now. You actually learn things as you go along, you get smarter, even if, in the end, Strauss is going to tell you that you’re not smart enough until you reckon with his argument.

In other words, where our lit reviews leave the reader with the sense that you’ve essentially been wasting their time and your own, Strauss’s version of the lit review gives you a sense of gratitude, of time well spent, of having learned something through the exercise. Even if you were in the company, for a time, of someone not quite as right or intelligent as he is. He gives you a sense of thinking on the page, of what teaching and learning actually is. And that’s not nothing.