 In 1932, Strauss wrote a review of Carl Schmitt’s recently published book The Concept of the Political, in which he argued that, despite Schmitt’s attempts to do otherwise, Schmitt still remained within the horizon of modern liberalism because he was unable to offer reasons for his normative commitment to what he called “the political.” Many of Strauss’s subsequent critics have interpreted his claim that Schmitt remained a liberal as proof of what they consider Strauss’s anti-liberal ire. However, Strauss’s critique of Schmitt is perhaps better understood as evidence of what would be Strauss’s life long worry about modern liberalism’s ability to justify its normative commitment to liberal ideals in the face of moral skepticism, relativism and what Strauss also called “philistinism,” all of which say “in effect that one does not have to think about the reasons why those things [of liberalism] are good” (WPP, 21). If the modern liberal state is impartial to questions of value, how then does the liberal state justify its own value? Schmitt would state that no one had understood him as Strauss had, and Strauss would later claim that reading Schmitt changed his own orientation toward the question of the relation between philosophy and politics.