Last week, the Collegian noted the death and honored the life of Harry Jaffa, an influential political philosopher and cherished intellectual hero of Hillsdale College. Mike Sabo’s piece (“Harry Jaffa redefined political philosophy,” Jan. 23), recounted Sabo’s own first encounter with Jaffa’s project:
“Jaffa likened attending his first classes with Leo Strauss to Saul being trans-formed while on the road to Damascus,” Sabo wrote. “Reading Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided had a similar effect on me as an undergraduate.”
Jaffa certainly warrants admiration and careful attention, but comparing an encounter with Jaffa’s work to a sort of Straussian quasi-religious experience is unwarranted and counterproductive. Of course, the metaphor Jaffa used (and which Sabo appropriated) was intended to express something less than religious devotion. But tacit here is the language of discipleship, of proselytization in the name of Truth, Justice, and Right. Jaffa, a finite being, had no apprehension of the Absolute. To invest his thought with primarily ahistorical significance does violence to his body of work.
Any figure’s work — historian, philosopher, statesman, author — is necessarily borne out within a context. A philosophic project takes place in an intricate web of theoretical give-and-take, an academic milieu from which it is dangerous to extract an author and his work. To separate the author from his given surroundings falsifies his project.
Jaffa’s argument for the Founders’ assertion of an abstract and ahistorical natural law (and, by extension, a system of universal natural rights) ran explicitly counter to the conservative intelligentsia of the time. Many of them were strict traditionalist or “paleo-”conservatives, emphasizing precedent and custom over (or to the exclusion of) abstraction or principle. The traditionalists contended that there was a certain violent injustice in the rhetoric of universals to which Lincoln so often appealed.
And so Jaffa responded, making a strong case for the presence and intelligibility of a natural law paradigm which remained relevant and viable in modern American politics. (His perception of the precise nature of Founding principles did change, however, between the publication of his first book on Lincoln, Crisis of the House Divided, and his second, A New Birth of Freedom.)
The Declaration is undoubtedly an assertion of abstract truths founded on natural law, and Jaffa’s project made this argument credible among those shaping conservative thought. But an abstract truth has no effective content unless borne out through time and within a society. An author’s work keeps little of its true substance when plucked from its originary time and place. To separate the principles of right asserted in the Declaration from its rich philosophical context is a partial falsification of its monumental achievements; so, too, the concepts at play in Jaffa’s intricate body of work.
The universal is inextricably wedded to particularity. The “exceptional principles” that make liberty possible cannot be made manifest without tradition, history, and place. A sound refutation of historical relativism need not be the embrace of dogmatic universalism.
