Could any tyrant have plotted a more patient, thorough and ruthless path to power? Leo Strauss, the political philosopher who died in 1973, might have seemed just a harmless German-Jewish émigré, teaching Plato and Machiavelli at the University of Chicago. But according to recent critics, he was actually preparing an intellectual putsch, which would take place 30 years after his death and culminate in the war in Iraq.

His students and followers, these critics say, learned their lessons well and like good soldiers began a long march through a variety of institutions, seeking control. They maneuvered into foundations, institutes and departments of state and war. Then they began their shadow rule, leading the nation into foolhardy war. Presumably, their mentor gazes down from the heavens (or upward from the other place), beaming with satisfaction.

I exaggerate slightly, but this really is a theory that has taken shape in recent years in newspaper reports, magazine articles and books. Strauss has been characterized as an antidemocratic ultraconservative: the shadowy intellectual figure behind some of the men who planned the Iraq war. He has been called a cynical teacher who encouraged his students to believe in their right to rule humanity, a patron saint of neoconservatives, a believer in the use of "noble lies" to manipulate the masses. And he has been linked (with variable accuracy) to, among others, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense; and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In 2004, Strauss's face demonically loomed over Tim Robbins's agitprop antiwar play "Embedded," at the Public Theater in New York, as he was hailed with brutish chants. Books like "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" (Yale) by Anne Norton have relished telling of his baleful influence.

Into this fray, Steven B. Smith, a political scientist at Yale University, has now stepped, with an important collection of essays that offers an elegantly argued scrutiny of Strauss's work, examining his views of Spinoza and Judaism, Heidegger and Machiavelli, tyranny and idealism. Mr. Smith's book, "Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism" (University of Chicago Press), argues that Strauss, far from being a conservative, was a "friend of liberal democracy — one of the best friends democracy has ever had." Moreover, despite the assertions of his critics, Strauss "saw politics neither from the Right nor from the Left but from above." (Another book, "The Truth About Leo Strauss," by Catherine and Michael Zuckert, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in September, also mounts a defense of Strauss.)

Mr. Smith's close readings are too detailed to quickly summarize, but he makes it clear just how thoroughly Strauss has been misunderstood. Strauss's difficult and subtle arguments concerning democracy and tyranny, for example in his books "Natural Right and History," "On Tyranny" and "Persecution and the Art of Writing," bear little resemblance to the caricatures created by critics.

Strauss, like many other intellectual refugees from the 20th century's worst tyrannies, recognized the glories and achievements of democratic modernity, which shaped his new American home. But he also saw its oddities, understanding that in a democratic culture, concepts like virtue and honor had less significance than those of equality and liberty.

In a democracy it is more difficult to make absolute statements about justice or morality; it is easier to see other perspectives and grant them equivalence. And if people can remake themselves with such democratic ease, why can't they also be remade by others? Mankind is malleable, if properly led.

But, Strauss suggested, there are problems inherent in these views; one way to understand these problems better is to look to the past. Around the time of Machiavelli, Strauss argued, something profound began to change in politics and philosophy. Different ideas about humanity were developing, some encouraged by the growing power of science and an increasing faith in the ability of reason to transform the world, others by the dismantling of old hierarchies and the development of democracy. Notions of human progress and political evolution took root.

While some of these ideas, no doubt, transformed the world for the better, some — about the perfectibility of humanity and the ability to transform the world — ended up as the handmaidens of 20th-century tyranny. Strauss was wary. "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy," he wrote, "precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy."

As a kind of remedy, Strauss was engaged in trying to synthesize the worlds of the ancient and the modern. But how? What, he asked, were the ancients saying? What was said about justice in Plato or faith in Maimonides? The answers are more difficult to discern than it seems. Strauss argued that premodern philosophers, like Plato or Maimonides, who worried about persecution, presented their ideas in costumed form, cloaking dangerous truths so that they could be discerned only by "trustworthy and intelligent readers."

Could anything seem less democratic? Here was Strauss, saying that the knowledge of the ancients was essential to the future development of democracy, that contemporary understandings of warfare and politics would be seriously limited without that philosophical perspective and that an elite was required to interpret that perspective. Moreover, the ancients' immutable truths, when finally discerned, had nothing to do with democratic consensus and culture; indeed, they often could seem incompatible with them.

The self-righteous fury unleashed against Leo Strauss is partly because of the sense that he sinned against one of the most sacred doctrines of democratic culture: egalitarianism.

But in the end Strauss's message does get through. What the ancients remind us is that humanity is not infinitely perfectible, that the ideal world is not ruled by reason alone, that cultural and historical variation does not mean that anything goes, that notions of egalitarianism do not guarantee virtue.

These views can sound almost trite, reduced to such propositions. But consider, then, how few societies in the past have explored such far-reaching conclusions, how few have also been able to live by them, and how much opposition such views have spurred.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company