Natural Right and Political Right Essays in Honor of Harry V. Jaffa

444 Pages·1984·205.569 MB·English

by  Thomas B. Silver, Peter W. Schramm

NATURAL RIGHT AND
POLITICAL RIGHT

NATURAL RIGHT AND
POLITICAL RIGHT
ESSAYS IN HONOR OF HARRY V. JAFFA
edited by
Thomas B. Silver
Peter W Schramm
CAROLINA ACADEMIC PRESS
Durham, North Carolina 27707
Published by Carolina AcadcmiL Press
Post Office Box 8795
Forest Hills Station
Durham, NC 27707
© Thomas B. Silver and Peter W. Schramm
First Published 1984
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 84-70180
ISBN 0-89089-279-2 (cloth)
CONTENTS
Introduction
3
1. Dante and the Rediscovery of Political Philosophy
Ernest L. Fortin
9
2. Jefferson and the Practice of Empire
David Tucker
3. Elements of Ancient and Modern Harmony
John Adams Wettergreen 45
4. The Great Machiavellian Deed?
Reconsideration of Frederick II's Invasion of Silesia
Peter W. Schramm
5. The Failure of Henry V
Larry Peterman
6. Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress
Charles R. Kesler
103
7. Rousseau and Hobbes on the Unity of the State
Edward J. Erler 129
8. John Locke and the American Founding
Jeffrey D. Wallin 143
9. The Absent Executive in Aristotle's Politics
HarveyC. Mansfield,Jr. 169
10. Machiavelli and Caesar
Grant Mindle 197
Young Men in a Hurry:
11.
Roosevelt, Lodge and the Foundations of
Twentieth Century Republicanism
Patrick]. Garrity 225
12. Defending Socrates and Defending Politics
Thomas G. West 235
13. The Peaceful Purposes of Winston Churchill
L. P. Arnn
V
14. Another Peek at Aristotle and Phyllis:
The Place of Women in Aristotle's
Argument for Human Equality
Ken Masugi
15. The Hero Abroad:
Toward an Interpretation of Tom Sawyer Abroad
Dennis]. Mahoney
16. Equality, Liberty and Consent in A Theoiy ofJ ustice
Thomas Engeman
17. The Orthodox John Dickinson
Christopher Flannery
18. Phenomenology and Political Philosophy
John Zvesper
1 g. The Political Odyssey of Herbert Wehner
Wayne C. Thompson 343
20. Political Philosophy or Nihilist Science?
Education's Only Serious Question
Harry Neumann
2 1. The l\fan Who Walked With God
Thomas B. Silver
375
22. The Religion of Rootlessness
Sanderson Schaub
23. From Factions to Parties:
America's Partisan Education
Donald V. Weatherman 401
24. Time Out of Mind:
Burke's Constitution
Francis Canavan, S.J.
Contribmors
The Writings of Harry V Jaffa
VJ
NATURAL RIGHT AND
POLITICAL RIGHT

INTRODUCTION
IMAGINE YOURSELF MAROONED ON A DESERT ISLAND WITH ONLY TEN BOOKS
to read, but in this case books not of your own choosing. Suppose them all
to be books written by behavioral political scientists during the past twenty
years. Question: Do you think that you would die first of boredom, or of
self-inflicted wounds?
This was the situation of many undergraduate students of political
science in the 196o's, including some of the contributors to this volume.
Except that we didn't realize that we were living on a desert island. And
although we had been intellectually starved to death, we never realized
that we were dead.
Never realized, that is to say, until we were born again. Those who
have undergone the religious experience of being born again often de-
scribe it as private and ineffable. Our rebirth, on the other hand, was an
experience shared by friends, susceptible to a precise articulation. As
young political scientists we had had drilled into us the central tenet of
positivism: the distinction between facts and values, according to which
reason is powerless to guide human life. Qua political scientists, we were
islands unto ourselves in the midst of the ferocious and bloody political
controversies of the sixties, cut off from the citizen's perspective on politi-
cal questions. But because the central tenet of our science was a recent
discovery, allegedly unknown to earlier political thinkers, there was hardly
any incentive to read books published much before our own generation.
Cut off from the citizen's perspective, we were also cut off from what has
been called "the conversation among the greatest minds." The exact mo-
ment of our rebirth was when we were pulled into that conversation, and
the man who pulled us in was Professor Harry V: Jaffa.
Literally within moments of our first meeting with Jaffa there was a
stunning enlargement of our horizons. Young "scholars" who, the day
before, had not known a polis from a poultice, were suddenly listening
avidly as Professor Jaffa read aloud from the Greek text of Plato's Phaedo.
Soon after came Shakespeare's Roman plays, seen from an entirely new
perspective. And then Aristotle's Ethics, and Aquinas's commentary, and
the Rej1ublic, and Tom Sawyer, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and
Churchill's Marlborough, and Natural Right and History, and the Politics,
and ... but enough. Here were ten books, any one of which we gladly
would have taken to a desert island in place of a whole library of our
3
4 NATURAL RIGHT AND POLITICAL RIGHT
previous fare. Books which would have repaid endless study and pro-
duced endless delight.
Professor Jaffa did not introduce us to a conversation in which he
himself had no part. He mixed his labor with the great books and made
them his own. His classes were almost never lectures or systematic pres-
entations. They were conversations, marvelous conversations, which dem-
onstrated our teacher's incessant search for clarity and resolution. He
had the ability to make lucid, simple formulations of philosophical posi-
tions and to show their plausibility and significance, but then to soar off
into the most imaginative conversational flights in which the dialogue
between these philosophical positions was illustrated in original and
nonformulaic ways. His conversation, more than that of any other teacher
in our experience, sowed sparks in the minds of his students.
He was combative as hell, of course, from the moment he walked
into the classroom and wrote "NO SMOKING" on the blackboard to the
final bell or the final TKO, whichever came last. But never mean spirited,
or condescending, or resentful, or cruel. Never happier, in fact, than
when his students in class discussions were stalking him, or laying traps,
or baiting him, like dogs rushing at a great bear, hoping to do together
what they could only rarely do as individuals: bring him down in the
argument. ("What do you mean 'rarely,"' we can imagine him saying,
"when did you ever bring me down, either together or alone!")
These conversations often spilled over into after-class gatherings;
indeed, they spilled over into our whole lives. Jaffa was constantly accessi-
ble and constantly talking about political philosophy: on the telephone,
at his house, in the gym, at parties, at chance meetings on the stree:. It
was not only that he was extremely gracious about receiving students and
talking with them for hours on end, but that he actually sought them
out, for long conversations, again and again over the years.
The surest place to catch him was at dawn or at dusk, on his bicycle.
Riding with the Old Man was an experience to harden both the muscles
and the mind, for even while pedaling at a breathtaking pace, at a
godforsaken hour, he would continue to discourse in his habitual way
about all manner of things, right up to the last quarter mile of the ride,
when suddenly he would accelerate in a determined effort to leave his
young students in his dust, with no consideration for the fact that the
students' conduct the previous evening, in the company of wine, women,
food, song, and cigars, might not have been completely up to Aristotle's
specifications in Book III of the Ethics.
But his conversations were not the only way in which Professor Jaffa
participated in the conversation of the greatest minds. No one, friend or
foe, who has ever read Crisis of the House Divided has denied that it is the
work of a maste1: The judicious tone, the extraordinary learning, the
moral seriousness, the crisp and sometimes beautiful prose of the book