Strauss

"The Athenian does not question the divine origin of the Cretan and Spartan laws; he accepts it on the authority of his interlocutors. But he immediately asks for the reason or the end for which those laws were established... He asks, in Socratic fashion, what the lawgiver had in mind in establishing the laws." — Chapter I, p. 4

If there is no standard higher than the ideals of one’s society, there exists no possibility of taking a critical distance from those ideals. But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the ideals of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether enslaved to his society, and therefore that we are able, and even obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge of the ideals of our society, as well as of any other society. This standard cannot be found in the needs of the society concerned.