Persecution and the Art of Writing

Persecution and the Art of Writing is a 1941 essay, later included in an anthology of the same name, by Leo Strauss.

The essay was first published in the final issue of Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, an organ of the Frankfurt Institute School for Social Research. Editors of that journal included Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and frequent contributors of the journal during its run included Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Strauss expanded the concept into a book-length collection of lectures in 1952.

Original Article

The essay concerns styles of writing that are—in a stringently technical sense—occult. That is to say: Writing which attempt to conceal themselves from censorship and persecution during authoritarian ages and under censorious regimes. How to read these works and why it may be important to do so for the purpose of historical understanding is the theme of the Strauss's article.

The expression "writing between the lines" indicates the subject of this article. For the influence of persecution on literature is precisely that it compels all writers who hold heterodox views to develop a peculiar technique of writing, the technique which we have in mind when speaking of writing between the lines.This expression is clearly metaphoric. Any attempt to express its meaning in unmetaphoric language would lead to the discovery of a terra incognita, a field whose very dimensions are as yet unexplored and which offers ample scope for highly intriguing and even important investigations.

Strauss's primer on occult writings (in the above-mentioned sense) is at once a contribution to historiography, and a reflection with immediate contemporary relevance insofar as he wrote this work at a moment when Hitler controlled almost all of continental Western Europe. The messages coming out of territories conquered or otherwise annexed to the Third Reich in 1941 was, therefore, highly occluded. Some finesse in the art of decipherment and 'reading between the lines' would be required to understand messages and media being transmitted from public venues on the European mainland for some time to come. Strauss had been lecturing in France in 1932 and (as a Jew) decided not to return to Germany when Hitler came to power in January 1933. He escaped to the United States several years later, in 1937, accepting a guest-lecturer position at Columbia University. He had only recently been appointed to the faculty of the New School for Social Research when this article was published.

Persecution and the Art of Writing (Anthology of Essays)

An anthology published in 1952 by the Free Press, is a book of collected articles written by Leo Strauss. The book contains five previously published essays, many of which were significantly altered by Strauss from their original publication:

1. Introduction
2. Persecution and the Art of Writing
3. The Literary Character of the Guide to the Perplexed
4. The Law of Reason in the Kuzari
5. How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise

The general theme of the book is the relationship between politics and philosophy. The thesis of the book is that many ancient and early modern political philosophers, in order to avoid persecution, hid their most heterodox ideas within their texts. The final three essays explore the style of writing and reading introduced in the first essay.