Gradually we found ourselves going to the same class of (Prof.) Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss at that time was engaged in a great debate as to whether or not political science should be anchored, as David Easton felt it should be, on a clear and distinct separation between fact and value.

David Easton’s book The Political System came out and Easton was trying to argue that politics is the authority of allocation of values and Leo Strauss would say in class, “That sounds pretty good but still leads us to the question, ‘What is the best value?’” He began to use the word “regime.” You couldn’t understand Plato and Aristotle or politics unless you really did understand that you’re looking for the best regime. In the end the best regime for him was – like Aristotle felt – one that was ruled by aristocrats. Not oligarchs, but aristocrats, the best and the most excellent people who had a certain degree of moral and intellectual integrity and stature and were regarded by their fellow human beings as having wisdom. Wisdom was very central to his understanding of what the best man was like. The best regime would be the regime in which people like that would rule, which is very similar to Plato’s notion of philosophers being kings and kings being philosophers. That’s the answer to the problem of the human condition.

So we were interested in that and excited by it but we also noticed that there was in class Allan Bloom and others who later became sort of a conservative wedge in our politics.

John Resenbrink,
University of Chicago graduate school classmate and early Williams College faculty colleague