Scholars of American Politics

This group among the original Straussians were scholars mainly of American politics and political thought rather than the old masters of the history of political philosophy with whom Strauss was so intimate. Strauss had little to say in print about American politics, but he encouraged some of his students who were so inclined to study the politics of their country, which they did. America was Strauss’s adopted country, and he had some sensitivity for the difference between a naturalized citizen like himself and a native. He once gave it as a reason, no doubt jocular, why he should not be made president of the American Political Science Association—not that there was ever any groundswell to offer him this honor.

There was another reason to attract Strauss-ians into the study of American politics. This was the evident, self-announced status of America as a kind of philosophic republic, based on “self-evident truths” according to the Declaration of Independence and offering an experiment in the possibility of founding “good government” according to “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” as is said on the first page of The Federalist. To enhance these statements of universal import we also have the testimony of Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address citing the Civil War as a test of whether America “or any nation so conceived and so dedicated” to a universal “proposition that all men are created equal” can long endure. And besides, there is the continued reference in The Federalist to political science as the source of American political institutions rather than parochial custom or inherited history.

This evidence of avowed purpose and conscious design adds up to a picture of America as the country that believes it has solved the political problem of popular government by establishing a government that is strong enough to defeat all dangers and free enough not to become a danger itself. This perfect republic designed by philosophy and science, however, is just what Strauss denied could be achieved. His work was defined by emphasis on the subversiveness of philosophy, which asks questions, as opposed to the self-satisfaction of politics, which believes it has answers and insists on them. For Strauss, the fate of Socrates in Athens, where he was killed for philosophizing, is emblematic of the human situation, in which men are torn between the twin needs (borrowing from The Federalist as above) to “reflect” in philosophy and to “choose” in politics. Philosophy and politics, as with Socrates and Athens, will always sense danger from one another, philosophy sensing complacency in politics, politics fearing intrusion from philosophy.

Among followers of Strauss, one issue is the importance of politics in the relationship

of politics and philosophy. Politics thinks it is the most important human activity because it decides who rules in the world. Every human activity, including the most private matters such as the philosopher’s reflection, takes place under the rule of some authority that protects or permits it. It is philosophy’s business to question this authority and its self-proclaimed importance, and to bring its assertions to the bar of reason and its assurances to the test of eternity. The issue then is whether philosophy’s claim to importance is sovereign over politics so as to eclipse politics, or does philosophy have something to learn from politics in a way that rescues the importance of politics?

Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa both took the latter view, and they studied American politics as a serious subject and America as a kind of philosophical republic. Since both of them spent their lives in the study of American politics, their lifelong professional premise required that they take the notion of political virtue seriously and not make its inferiority to philosophy their main theme—as does Plato in his Republic. But each of them did this differently.

Berns was impressed by men of political and moral virtue. His work was in American constitutional law, but he approached that subject from the standpoint of virtue. His first book was called Freedom, Virtue and the First Amendment (1957), and the zinger in the title was the word “virtue.” Dominant opinion in the field had come to suppose almost that “freedom” meant above all freedom from the demand to have and show virtue. Virtue would set too high a standard for democratic freedom; in practice, it would be hardhearted and lack compassion for the unfortunate who need more money, not more virtue. Berns upheld the view that freedom and virtue had to be compatible if not identical, and it was the purpose of the Constitution to set both government and people where they could excel. The Constitution is as much a way of life as a structure of limited government, in fact more a way of life because the constitutional limitations on government were an invitation to virtue in the people, not a substitute for it. In this he shared the view of legal realism, also dominant at that time and still today, that there is something more powerful than the law that the law serves. But for him it was virtue as opposed to money and power, for money and power are means to an end, which is virtue (somehow understood). Virtue is and deserves to be more powerful because it is higher, not lower, than the law.

Socrates would not have been killed by the Athenians if they had had a Constitution with a First Amendment. But perhaps this is because the First Amendment makes Americans indifferent to philosophy.  In that case one might be permitted to speak of America as a “philosophical republic” that allows philosophy but ignores it, as Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, rather than listening to it and taking it seriously like the Athenians. The First Amendment gives intellectuals free rein to attack the morals, the religion, and the politics of the multitude, in sum to offend virtue and its practitioners and defenders to the utmost. This is how it looked to Walter Berns in The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (1976) as well as in his first book. But the First Amendment also allowed him to speak as an anti-intellectual, and in support of virtue.

Berns was a man of strong, well-directed loyalties—to his friends, to his family, to his country. Reflecting on this fact, for he knew himself well, he wrote a book defending patriotism, Making Patriots, toward the end of his life. He was a man with a chest, and he wanted to give thoughtful expression to the passions of his heart. Why does virtue, which seems to lift us above our attachments, nonetheless show itself most impressively, if not inevitably, within the narrow bounds of one’s family and country?

Harry Jaffa was a man of greater zeal than loyalty, if loyalty means paying honor to things and persons as they are (as I believe it does). As his kind of patriot he would pledge his fealty to an America that he would show was a philosophical republic. Never a fan of Tocqueville, he did not appreciate Tocqueville’s analysis of America as a country of Cartesians who had never read Descartes, and of moral citizens who hid their moral passion under an overmodest doctrine of “self-interest well understood.” Whereas Tocqueville makes no mention of the Declaration of Independence in his great work Democracy in America, Jaffa makes everything of it. The declaration is not so much of “independence” as it is of the self-evident truth of human equality, which in denying that men are divided into free and slave is the source of all morality and sound politics. Jaffa did this through his study of Abraham Lincoln.

In 1959 Jaffa published his chef-d’oeuvre, Crisis of the House Divided, the best book ever written on Abraham Lincoln, the one that proved him to be the greatest American. In it Jaffa laid out the relation of Lincoln’s politics to his thought, his strategy to his intent. Treating Lincoln’s writings with the seriousness of a difficult philosophical text, and using the sensitivity to the tools of indirection that he learned from Strauss, he brought Lincoln’s thoughtfulness fully to light for the first time. Lincoln, he argued, even more than the Founders, was the statesman who explained to America what it was, who made America aware of itself as “the last best hope of earth.” Tocqueville could praise untheoretical America for its practice rather than its philosophy of freedom only because he died in 1859, before he could learn of Lincoln. As to the myriad crowd of Lincoln scholars, Jaffa quieted their sullen defamation by bringing out the intelligence and noble purpose of Lincoln’s maneuvers.

One might think it impossible to exaggerate the importance of this book if Jaffa had not shown us how. In other books he made the understanding of Lincoln’s America the solution to all difficulties, the combination of all good things: democracy and aristocracy, ancients and moderns, prudence and principle, Christians and pagans, philosophy and statesmanship, the good and one’s own. The only dualities he left intact were liberal and conservative, Jew and Gentile. These he kept in order to maintain or, more accurately, appease his excess of fighting spirit.

Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa were both in their respective ways fighters for liberty, liberals of the old school—hence conservatives today. They were characters with plenty of definition, outstanding, beneficial, and memorable.

Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.