 Appreciating the centrality of Strauss’s concern with the theologico-political predicament allows us also to reconsider claims about his purported sympathy for fascism. In recent years, much has been made of a letter that the young Strauss wrote to his friend Karl Löwith in 1933. Writing from Paris and reflecting on Hitler’s rise to power, Strauss wrote that it was only possible to “protest against the shabby abomination” of Nazi Germany “from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian, and imperial principles” (GS 3, pp. 624–625). A number of Strauss’s severest critics refer to this letter as evidence of Strauss’s fascism, if not Nazism. Yet, as Robert Howse has concisely pointed out, “It requires only a little care, and remembering the context of the letter, to understand that Strauss is not here affirming as true ‘the principles of the right’ but rather he is suggesting that they are the only effective basis on which Hitler (’the shabby abomination’) could be opposed in the present circumstances” (Howse 2012). Rather than an expression of sympathy for the fascist, imperial right of Hitler’s Germany, Strauss’s letter to Löwith is further evidence of his life long moral worry about liberal democracy’s ability to offer a coherent account of its own normative commitments.  It may even reflect Strauss’s fundamental commitment to peace (Howse, 2014).