Harry Jaffa redefined political philosophy

Home Opinion Harry Jaffa redefined political philosophy

Harry V. Jaffa, perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century next to Leo Strauss, passed away on Saturday, Jan. 10. Jaffa, Professor Emeritus at Claremont McKenna and Claremont Graduate Schools, deeply studied not only classical political philosophy but also American political thought, Shakespeare, and the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

Through essays, speeches, and books, he advocated for a constitutionalism based upon the natural rights and natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence. Much to the chagrin of M.E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, and other paleo- and traditionalist conservatives, he devoted himself to re-founding modern conservatism on the abstract truth that “all men are created equal.”

It can be argued that Jaffa was the intellectual grandfather to the Tea Party, whose appeals to individual natural rights — which undergird the Constitution — surely made him smile.  Though I did not know him personally, I can safely say that without Jaffa’s influence on my education, I would not be studying politics at Hillsdale College. Jaffa likened attending his first classes with Leo Strauss to Saul being transformed while on the road to Damascus. Reading Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided had a similar effect on me as an undergraduate.

During my freshman year at Ashland University, Jaffa visited and lectured on Lincoln’s statesmanship at a colloquium hosted by the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs. He was in his mid-80’s but still a forceful speaker, though his speech was delivered with a slower cadence than it had once been. Sensing that this man had something important to teach and witnessing the reverence Professor of Political Science Peter Schramm — then Executive Director of the Center — and the other professors at Ashland University had for him, I picked up a copy of his most well-known book, Crisis of the House Divided. (Schramm told me that undergraduates shouldn’t be reading that book, but knowing the heart of man, he understood that the fruit he said was forbidden wouldn’t go untouched for long.)

Jaffa opened the work the only way he knew how: Castigating the scholars of his day for their historicism and positivism, which they had uniformly taken for granted in their works. They had reduced the fight between Lincoln and his chief antagonist, Stephen Douglas, to a contest of competing narratives — a contest with no principles at stake. Jaffa devoted more than 100 pages arguing for Douglas and his policy of popular sovereignty, which took a pragmatic middle ground between radical Republicans, who wanted rid the nation of the sin of slavery at virtually any cost, and the Southerners, who called for disunion and secession. Lincoln argued that there was no middle ground between right and wrong.

Lincoln used the Constitution and principles set forth therein to keep the Union dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. In fighting first for that Union and then for the extirpation of slavery, Jaffa presented Lincoln as improving upon the “low but solid” principles of the Founding. In his sequel, A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa instead taught that Lincoln had not transcended Founding principles but had appealed to them.

Reading and thinking about Jaffa’s Crisis emancipated me from my own positivism and historicism and allowed me to see that human action, and not the progress of History, was the impetus behind whether good or evil would triumph. The United States was an exceptional country because of its exceptional principles. I had been a political conservative prior, but I did not know that what I was trying to conserve was not tradition, history, or place: It was these principles that made liberty possible. In his “Eulogy for Henry Clay,” Lincoln stated the following, which applies to Jaffa as much as it did to Clay: “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country, and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity, and glory, because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity, and glory of human liberty, human right, and human nature.”