Shadia Drury

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Research Interests

• History of political thought: From Plato to Postmodernism
• Classical Thought: Socrates, Plato, Homer, and the Tragic Poets
• Political Ideologies: liveralism, conservatism, neo-conservatism, socialism, and facism
• American Politics
• Religion and Politics
• Ethics and meta-ethics

SHADIA B. DRURY was Canada Research Chair in Social Justice; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; Director of the Master’s Program in Social and Political Thought; and Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Regina 2003-2013. She is now Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor at the University of Winnipeg. Her most recent book is Chauvinism of the West: The Case of American Exceptionalism (2025): a critique of the political philosophies that inspire Democratic and Republican foreign policy in the United States. In 2019, she published The Bleak Political Implications of Socratic Religion, which poses a radical challenge to the legend of Socrates as bequeathed by Plato and echoed by scholars through the ages. In Aquinas and Modernity (2008), she shows how Aquinas betrays the theory of natural law in favour of a politics of salvation. Other books include Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche (2004), where she documents the deleterious influence of Christianity on Western thought, including Nietzsche and Freud; and Alexandre Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (1994). Her most famous books are The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988, updated edition, 2005), and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997), where she explores the dark side of neoconservatism.