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This first full-length treatment of Lenin's studies of Hegel presents Lenin as a major figure in Hegelian Marxism, providing a more nuanced portrait of his work than that of either official Marxist-Leninism or most Western accounts.
       "With impressive argumentation
        and wide-ranging scholarship, Anderson presents us with a Lenin that no
        one seriously interested in current debates over the relevance of Marxist
        theory to socialist practice can afford to miss." -- Bertell Ollman,
        author of Dialectical Investigations
      "An important contribution
        to grasping the conceptual roots of Marxist theory and practice."
        -- Tom Rockmore, author of Hegel's Circular Epistomology
      "Today Lenin looks like
        he did little more than prepare the way for Stalin. You will find the
        opposite view in this novel study. . . . I recommend the book to anyone
        seriously interested in Russia and revolution." -- George Uri Fischer,
        author of The Soviet System and Modern Society
 

In the winter of 1965, Leo Strauss taught a seminar on Hegel at the University of Chicago. While Strauss neither considered himself a Hegelian nor wrote about Hegel at any length, his writings contain intriguing references to the philosopher, particularly in connection with his studies of Hobbes, in his debate in On Tyranny with Alexandre Kojève; and in his account of the “three waves” of modern political philosophy.
           
Leo Strauss on Hegel reconstructs Strauss’s seminar on Hegel, supplemented by passages from an earlier version of the seminar from which only fragments of a transcript remain. Strauss focused his seminar on the lectures collected in The Philosophy of History, which he considered more accessible than Hegel’s written works. In his own lectures on Hegel, Strauss continues his project of demonstrating how modern philosophers related to ancient thought and explores the development and weaknesses of modern political theory. Strauss is especially concerned with the relationship in Hegel between empirical history and his philosophy of history, and he argues for the primacy of religion in Hegel’s understanding of history and society. In addition to a relatively complete transcript, Leo Strauss on Hegel also includes annotations, which bring context and clarity to the text.