In a stunning coincidence, two eminent scholars in their 90s died last Saturday, Walter Berns, an emeritus colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, and Harry Jaffa, professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and a fellow of the Claremont Institute. Both were students of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s and both remained active and alert well into their tenth decades. Neither their thinking nor their temperaments were identical: Berns was gently but persistently persuasive; Jaffa was argumentative and cantankerous.
As John J. Miller recounted in The College Fix in 2013, “’I do not mean to be gentle with you,’ Jaffa once wrote in an open letter to Walter Berns, another conservative scholar. ‘In your present state of mind, nothing less than a metaphysical two-by-four across the frontal bone would capture your attention.’ An annoyed Berns later retorted: ‘Who will rid us of this pest of a priest?’” They differed, I think, in fundamental starting points: Jaffa regarded the Declaration of Independence as the great touchstone of the American polity; for Berns it was the Constitution.
At walterberns.org, Jeremy Rabkin provides an introduction to Berns’ work:
Harry Jaffa’s greatest contribution was his book Crisis in the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, first published 55 years ago, with a 50th anniversary edition now available. Jaffa spends what I remember as nearly 100 pages persuading the reader of the wisdom of Stephen Douglas’s views, only to refute them in as many or more pages by showing the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln’s. For more on Jaffa, check out Timothy Sandefur’s essay on his blog.
