Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought by Leo Strauss (review)

286 LETTERS IN CANADA 1998 and chiaroscuro. For the work after the late 19605, which was virtually all in bronze, Hedgecoe uses colour with increasing frequency and drama, posing the sculptures against bright pink or buff grounds (subtly modu- . lated across the page) to display their range of patination. His emphasis is on surface, translated into pictorial terms, from grainy, soft-focus stone to the amazing range of colour that can be achieved in bronze. He translates Moore's work into pictorial form, suggesting a trajectory from the solidity of the eaJ;ly sculpture hewn from landscape to late works thathave the immaterialityofimages rather than objects, and the quality of painting with bronze. This is a highly prescriptive reading, underlined by the format and design of A Monumental Vision. If it is not convincing this is because Hedgecoe's enterprise has been to make an artist's book as much as a book about an artist; its implicit theme is an investigation of sculptural photography as an independent art from. There remains an unarticulated question about Moore's status. He was not, evidently, a Picasso, but the real stature of his work will only be fully acknowledged when webegin to treat himmore like Picasso and allow that his sculpture is susceptible to multiple and sophisticated readings and forms of analysis. Until then, it will remain a subject for picture books which, however beguiling, cannot fully do it justice. (MARGARET GARLAKE) Leo Strauss. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis ofModernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Edited with an introduction by Kenneth Hart Green State University of New York Press. xviii, 506. us $24.95 Leo Strauss has long been acknowledged as one of the foremost political philosophers ofthe twentieth century. The publicationshe authored as well as the tutelage he provided so many during his American teaching career at both the University of Chicago and St John's College in Annapolis allowed this refugee professor from Nazi Germany to achieve a position of unparalleled pre-eminence among modem students of political thought. While Strauss's publications on the esoteric nature of Maimonides' Guide have long been familiar to students of Jewish intellectual history, the relevance his insights on this topic possess for the direction of modern Jewish philosophy as well as the overarching Jewish interests that motivated and occupied so much of his attention has often been overlooked. Such neglect is no longer the case. Recent years, as the bibliography attached to this volume attests, have witnessed a renewed interest in Strauss's Jewish writings, and many in Jewish philosophical-theological circles have come to recognize the import Strauss's work possesses for the construction of modern Jewish thought. Among these scholars, none has played a more seminal role than Kermeth Hart Green, whose pathbreaking 1993 study of Strauss, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the HUMANITIES 287 Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, articulated the value Strauss possessed for reconstructing modernJudaism along Maimonidean lines. In this work, as well as in other essays, Green demonstrated that Maimonides, according to Strauss, did not view the autonomous demands of reason and the traditional structures and beliefs of religion as antitheticaL Instead, Mairnonides saw the esoteric pursuit of philosophy and the claims of faith as complementary . The latterprovided the popular foundation essentialfor the moral ordering of the individual and society, while the former had to be pursued so as to allow for a rational quest for truth. Strauss felt that this Maimonidean model provided for a dialectical interplay between reason and faith, an interplay that remained necessary in a modem intellectual climate where the stability classically provided by religion had been undermined by the relativistic conclusions advanced by a radical historicism. This Maimonidean paradigm, in the opinion of Green and others, offers the most promising path available for the reconstruction of Jewish thought in a postcritical age, and this volume allows the view advanced by Strauss to be disseminated to a wide intellectual audience. For all these reasons, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity is a particularly welcome addition to the canon of modem Jewish thought and intellectual history. Green prefaces the volume with a lengthy and insightful essay on 'Leo...