 Strauss’s work on Hobbes coincided with Hitler’s rise to power. Strauss thus turned his attention to Hobbes, whom he took to be the founding theorist of the liberal state, just as the idea of the German liberal state seemed to be collapsing. Strauss’s third book, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis was published in 1936. Linking his newly found attention to the relation between philosophy and politics with his previous work on what he regarded as Spinoza’s critique of religion, the book concerns what Strauss claimed was the intimate tie between modern liberalism and its critique of religion.