 Strauss accepted a position at the University of Chicago in 1949, where he would teach until his retirement in 1967. Upon joining Chicago’s faculty, Strauss gave a series of lectures on “Natural Right and History,” which would be published in 1953 under the same title. Natural Right and History remains Strauss’s best-known American work but its basic worry is an extension of his early doubts about the ability of twentieth-century philosophy to respond to the challenges of political and moral relativism. In the United States, and in the department of political science at Chicago, Strauss criticized what he took to be the moral relativism upon which the social sciences rested. He begins the book with an analysis of Max Weber, one of the principle founders of the academic discipline of social science, and attempts to show a direct line leading from Weber’s positivism to historicism, which Strauss defines as the view that “all human thoughts or beliefs are historical” (NRH, p. 25). He then contrasts modern conceptions of natural right, beginning with Hobbes, with ancient conceptions, beginning with Plato. The former, argues Strauss, ends in historicist relativism, in which there are no moral, political, or scientific standards beyond particular historical contexts. Natural Right and History asks, though does not answer, the question of whether it is possible to return to some concept of nature for understanding who we are as human beings and therefore to some notion of absolute moral standards.