4

Two conceptions of modernity can be found in Strauss’s works. One sees the rise of the modern world in terms of its increasing distance from classical natural right. This process finds its most cohesive expression in the historicism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Even more explicit in the works of students of Strauss such as A. Bloom and P. Manent, the second conception associates modernity with the rise of democracy, conceived, since the Greeks, as a natural political possibility. But whether understood as the result of a specific history or as a natural fact, Strauss consistently views modernity as an expression of unlimited human desire, one that takes the form of either a philosophy of the will or a democratic emancipation of sensibility.