Strauss, Leo. “On Plato's Apology of Socrates and Crito.” In Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 68–97. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
From the publisher:
“One of the outstanding thinkers of our time offers in this book his final words to posterity. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy was well underway at the time of Leo Strauss’s death in 1973. Having chosen the title for the book, he selected the most important writings of his later years and arranged them to clarify the issues in political philosophy that occupied his attention throughout his life.
As his choice of title indicates, the heart of Strauss’s work is Platonism—a Platonism that is altogether unorthodox and highly controversial. These essays consider, among others, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Marx, Moses Maimonides, Machiavelli, and of course Plato himself to test the Platonic understanding of the conflict between philosophy and political society. Strauss argues that an awesome spritual impoverishment has engulfed modernity because of our dimming awareness of that conflict.
Thomas Pangle’s Introduction places the work within the context of the entire Straussian corpus and focuses especially on Strauss’s late Socratic writings as a key to his mature thought. For those already familiar with Strauss, Pangle’s essay will provoke thought and debate; for beginning readers of Strauss, it provides a fine introduction. A complete bibliography of Strauss’s writings if included.”
Excerpt:
“The Apology of Socrates is the only Platonic work with Socrates in the title. Yet Socrates is visibly or invisibly the chief character in all Platonic dialogues: all Platonic dialogues are ‘apologies’ of or for Socrates. But the Apology of Socrates is the portal through which we enter the Platonic kosmos: it gives an account of Socrates’ whole life, of his whole way of life, to the largest multitude, to the authoritative multitude, to the city of Athens before which he was accused of a capital crime; it is the dialogue of Socrates with the city of Athens.”