The Concept of Esoteric and Exoteric Writing in Leo Strauss’s Philosophy

The study presents an analysis of the concept of esoteric and exoteric writing, analysed in the writings of one of the greatest political philosophers of the XXth century, Leo Strauss. In the early 1940s Strauss outlined a theory that is a project designed to revive the notion of the existence of esoteric and exoteric teachings of the "great thinkers" of the past. The article "Persecution and the art of writing" became the most important source of a unique methodology for working with the "great texts" of Al-Farabi, Maimonides, Halevi, Spinoza, etc. According to Strauss, "careful reading" of the texts of this philosophers allows us to discover the esoteric layer of their teachings, unorthodox truths written "between the lines" , for the public presentation of which the authors could be persecuted. The main goal of this work is to present an exhaustive explanation of the concept of esotericism / exoterism, the genesis of the principles of the hermeneutic method of Strauss, and also interpret them in the context of historicist criticism.