To begin to convey a sense of what an extraordinary and compelling figure Harry V. Jaffa was, I offer a confession: The only class notes I have kept from college or graduate school are contained in the dog-eared, green notebook from my courses with Jaffa, and I keep it in my top desk drawer. In idle moments, I read over those notes, reminding myself of key points, puzzling over ideas and observations I still don’t fully understand, but above all marveling at the mind of one of the great teachers of our time.
Nothing could prepare a student for the shock of hearing Harry Jaffa in the classroom for the first time. From virtually his first word, you could tell that this was not going to be political science or political philosophy as usually taught. Above all, it was instantly clear that the course would involve engagement with the most serious political matters at the highest level—notably, “the crisis of the West.” There was no pawing at the ground with methodological preliminaries, no “on the one hand, on the other hand.” We plunged headlong into the assigned texts—Aristotle and Aquinas—whose themes and implications Jaffa illuminated with a peripatetic brilliance that ranged from Plato to Shakespeare to Thackeray; from architecture to drama, music, and poetry; modern culture and sports, all without a single note. And that was just the first 15 minutes.
It was a dazzling vindication of the ancient claim that political philosophy is the queen of the sciences, and that the arguments between the greatest minds were not a matter of antiquarian curiosity or the mere history of ideas, but a live argument relevant to the here and now. My very first three hours in class with Jaffa cleared away years of half-learning, confused ideas, and superficially grounded opinions with a force that others who shared the same experience have compared to a religious conversion—just as Jaffa described his own first encounter with his great teacher, Leo Strauss.
Not that any class ever got very far into the assigned texts. Almost every Jaffa student who took his course on the Nicomachean Ethics has the same story: By the end of the semester, Jaffa had failed to get us beyond Book I (though by some miracle, when I took the course, we actually got through several chapters of Aquinas as well as Book II of the Ethics). It didn’t matter: By the end of that semester, everyone could comprehend the rest of the Ethics on his own.
This lack of normal progress through the assigned texts wasn’t a result of excess focus on minutiae or, still less, pointless digressions. Indeed, Jaffa’s classes consisted half or more of digressions, always deeply interesting, after which he would say, “Where were we? Oh yes—,” and he would pick up the main thread of his thought on the text exactly where he had left off. His memory was phenomenal, best seen in his ability to recite verbatim long quotations from memory.
Jaffa’s effectiveness in the classroom, and in his writing, was due chiefly to his ability to spot the innermost essence of an idea or problem and render the right way of thinking about the problem in simple and accessible language. This is not to say that his teachings were simple; merely that they were direct and sure. This was not always true of Strauss and his other leading students, who could be obscure or indirect. While Jaffa’s teaching often involved difficult and profound subtleties, he was never turgid.
You could see this trait at the core of Jaffa’s most famous work about Lincoln, Crisis of the House Divided, his detailed interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. At the time Jaffa took up this subject in the early 1950s, historians and political scientists largely ignored the debates; the conventional wisdom among historians was that the Civil War had been an “unnecessary war” and Lincoln’s position largely reducible to mere political ambition. Both were outgrowths of the historicism that dominates the modern mind. Jaffa noticed that “the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was in substance, and very nearly in form, identical with the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus” in Book I of The Republic. Because the fundamental questions of the ground of justice transcend time, the wider lessons of the Lincoln-Douglas debates were directly relevant today.
This led to Jaffa’s intense focus on the Declaration of Independence and the deeper character of the American regime, which in turn led to many of his quarrels with figures who were otherwise allies against the left, such as Walter Berns, Martin Diamond, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, and Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, among others. Jaffa thought an insufficient grasp of the connection between the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution was a significant error. His relentless pursuit of these disputes cost him many friendships and became the nub of the split between the so-called West Coast and East Coast Straussians that continues in various ways today.
If Jaffa seemed to delight in his quarrels, it was because he felt it vitally important that the right be right for the right reasons. William F. Buckley Jr. captured a truth with the comment, “If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him. It is nearly impossible.” Jaffa delighted in this remark, saying, “If Bill had lived to be a hundred, he could not have found better words to express the purpose of my life.” The lesson of Lincoln’s critique of Douglas, he thought, was that seemingly small theoretical errors could have large practical consequences. On an even higher level, the way in which we understand John Locke and the American Founding bears on the goodness and rightness of America as a regime, and hence the best means of defending it against the nihilism of modern liberalism.
Though his letters and articles were filled with the sharpest barbs for his targets, he was utterly without ill will or rancor in person. This was of a piece with his infinite generosity toward and interest in his students. A long succession of us shared a house over nearly two decades (rented from the famous Peter Drucker), and Jaffa would call us up just to chat. He wanted to hear what we were doing, and especially what we were reading and writing. He exhorted us to get busy and write. (His late wife, Marjorie, I should add, was our unofficial den mother, looking after us to make sure we were decently fed.) But these were not two-way chats for long. He needed to unburden himself of something that was on his mind. Often it was an indignant reaction to something on the current political scene, or a news item or wrongheaded op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. Just as often it was a philosophical offering. I vividly recall a profound mini-lecture over the phone on the relationship between Aristotle’s Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, lasting no more than 60 seconds and making me wish I’d had my notepad handy, for it was impossible to recapitulate afterward.
“A teacher affects eternity,” Henry Adams wrote. “He can never tell where his influence stops.” Jaffa’s influence was and is enormous. It is no exaggeration to say that he singlehandedly caused conservatives to embrace Lincoln after a long period of indifference or even hostility toward the Great Emancipator. Along the way Jaffa showed how conservatives should understand natural rights and contest the meaning of equality, rather than ceding these ideas to the mischief of the left. Lincoln’s statesmanship vindicated the Founding. Equally important to Jaffa was Winston Churchill’s statesmanship, which courageously took on nihilism and relativism. As he wrote in Crisis, “Henceforward, political science, properly so-called, would have at its heart the study of the speeches and deeds of statesmen.”
Just as Jaffa and other leading students of Leo Strauss broadened their outlook beyond classical political philosophy to the American regime, the concentric circles of Jaffa’s influence can be seen in the way in which conservatism in recent years has fixed upon Progressivism and the Progressive Era as the undoing of the American Founding. This recognition was remarkably absent from early postwar conservatism, which overlooked Progressivism’s direct attack on the Founding as it paved the way for the hated New Deal. This newfound focus, which shows up frequently in the popular work of Charles Kesler, George Will, Jonah Goldberg, and even that of a shock jock like Glenn Beck, among others, is the direct result of Jaffa’s inspiration on the next generation of students and writers.
One thing that marked out Jaffa’s students is that many of them chose nonacademic careers, as aides to elected officials, administration appointees, think tank analysts, speechwriters, journalists, and popular authors. We took seriously something Jaffa told us in class: “If the dominant reputations of the future—in scholarship as in politics—do not differ from those of the present, it will be an ill time for the fate of freedom.” To remain in the ivory tower, many of us concluded, was to fiddle while Rome burned.
I keenly remember the last two times I visited with Jaffa. The first was in 2003, when he had come to Washington for some function related to Lincoln. By then in his 80s, he had not lost a step. Over lunch (appropriately at a restaurant on Thomas Jefferson Street) with a few of his former students, Jaffa enthralled us once again. There was no beating around the bush. The fate of the world, he said, depended on the United States; the fate of the United States depended on the conservative movement; and the fate of the conservative movement depended upon the health and success of the Republican party—unfortunately so, since the GOP could be so confused and faltering. The fundamental causes of the crisis of the house divided that had summoned the Republican party into being were still present—and the Democratic party was just as intellectually corrupt as it was in the 1850s. We had our marching orders.
The second was about six years ago. I was passing briefly—or so I thought—through Claremont and decided to drop by Harry’s office at the Claremont Institute (he still went in every day, even though he had stopped teaching at the age of 90) just to say hello. I stayed two hours, as he gave me my own private seminar, a refresher course on the crisis of the West and what we needed to do to reverse it. He was reading, and disliking, Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book on neoconservatism; what did I think of it? Although much of what he said was familiar, coming directly from him it seemed as fresh as the first day of class all over again.
At one point he swiveled his chair around and paused to look up at his framed photo of Churchill walking alone on the forecastle of HMS Prince of Wales during the Atlantic conference of 1940. “The fate of the Western world depended on that single man, at that single moment,” he said, going on to recount his personal recollections from 1940. “We need him again.”
Whether we get a new Churchill or not, Harry Jaffa equipped a generation of students to know the difference, as Strauss put it, between mediocrity, however brilliant, and true greatness.
Steven F. Hayward is the Ronald Reagan distinguished visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy.
