17th-century philosophy in the West is generally regarded as seeing the start of modernphilosophy, and the shaking off of the mediæval approach, especially scholasticism.
In Western Philosophy, the modern period is usually taken to start with the seventeenth century — more specifically, with the work of René Descartes, who set much of the agenda as well as much of the methodology for those who came after him.
Immanuel Kant classified his predecessors into two schools: the Rationalists and the Empiricists, and EarlyModernPhilosophy (as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy is known) is often characterised in terms of a supposed conflict between these schools.
Strauss argues that the crisis of modernity, while corrosive of the social and political life in Western nations, could be for reflective souls an opportunity to be liberated from the project of modernity and its underlying assumptions.
Since for Strauss modernity had at its beginning a fundamental reformulation of political philosophy, in order to grasp the nature of modernity, and thereby better to understand our contemporary crisis, we are required to return to the earlymodern political thinkers--those who initiated the project of modern political philosophy.
The originators of modernity, the earlymodern thinkers, appear to argue for such a synthesis, and so for Strauss, either they were contradictory or their apparent contradictions hid a deeply consistent radical humanism.
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