Harry Jaffa: life, ideas and books

Life

Harry V. Jaffa was born in New York City in 1918 and studied English literature at Yale. He earned his doctorate in political philosophy at the New School for Social Research, with Leo Strauss as his advisor. He taught at Ohio State University from 1951 to 1964 and then at Claremont Men's College, later Claremont McKenna, and Claremont Graduate University, becoming a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute.

He wrote for Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, including the acceptance-speech line on extremism in defence of liberty. He died in California in 2015, aged 96.

Ideas

Jaffa's central claim was that the American founding rests on a principle of natural right, set out in the Declaration of Independence, and that the Constitution exists to secure it. For him the proposition that all men are created equal was the foundation of the regime and not a rhetorical flourish. He read the founders' thought as building on a tradition from Aristotle through Locke, and he insisted that the American way of life can be understood only by reference to its moral principles.

In Crisis of the House Divided (1959), a study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he presented Abraham Lincoln as a statesman and moral philosopher who defended the Declaration's principles against Stephen Douglas's popular sovereignty and against John C. Calhoun's defence of slavery as a positive good. He later extended the argument in A New Birth of Freedom (2000).

Major works

• Thomism and Aristotelianism (1952).
• Crisis of the House Divided (1959).
• How to Think About the American Revolution (1978).
• Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution (1994).
• Storm Over the Constitution (1999).
• A New Birth of Freedom (2000).

Why conservatives read him

Jaffa led what became known as the West Coast Straussians and argued with other conservatives, notably Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and Willmoore Kendall, over how to read the American tradition. Where traditionalists located conservatism in inherited custom and a suspicion of abstract natural rights, Jaffa held that the American conservative preserves a regime founded on a universal principle. That argument shaped the Claremont Institute and the style of constitutional reasoning on much of the American right, and Justice Clarence Thomas has said Jaffa influenced his judicial views.

He also debated Robert Bork on how to understand originalism, arguing that the original intent of the framers could not be separated from the principles of natural right. Critics, including those who see Lincoln differently, have disputed his picture of the Civil War era, but his books remain the starting point for conservatives who want the Declaration to carry as much weight as the Constitution. His connection to Leo Strauss and Abraham Lincoln defines his place in the canon.