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A Conservative Showdown
Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa, giants of American intellectualism, waged a war over the Declaration of Independence. William Anthony Hay reviews “Patriotism Is Not Enough” by Steven F. Hayward.
By
William Anthony Hay
April 28, 2017 4:40 p.m. ET
8 COMMENTS
The cliche has it that academic disputes are especially vicious because the stakes are so low. But now and then the stakes are high indeed. Over the course of several decades, two political philosophers battled over how best to understand American democracy. They were serious scholars with strong points of view and clashing personalities, so part of the quarrel had to do with matters of style and modes of expression. But ideas were the heart of the matter.
In “Patriotism Is Not Enough,” Steven F. Hayward presents a memoir of his own dealings with these remarkable men— Walter Berns and Harry V. Jaffa, who died on the same day in 2015—and traces their points of difference to a larger debate over the principles that guide American democracy. The book is a fascinating chronicle in itself and an instructive tour of important political precepts.
PHOTO: ALAMY
PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH
By Steven Hayward
Encounter, 280 pages, $25.99
WHAT TO READ THIS WEEK
Revisiting Walden; health care’s original sin; Martha’s Vineyard in mind; speeding up evolution; the lives of “infidels” in the Middle East; Paula Hawkins’s follow-up to “The Girl on the Train”; and much more.
At the heart of Mr. Hayward’s narrative is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the German émigré who taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Strauss looked to classical Greek philosophy as a source of wisdom rather than regarding it as a mere historical episode. A charismatic teacher, he shared with his students his concern—especially pressing in the 1960s—that Western society had lost its sense of purpose and legitimacy and faced a crisis. He believed that restoring the primacy of natural rights—rights that were God-given or embedded in nature—offered a path to recovery.
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Although Strauss looked to antiquity for political wisdom, several of his students and protégés, including Berns and Jaffa—who would go on to academic careers, Berns at Cornell and Jaffa at Claremont-McKenna—devoted themselves to the texts of the American founding. They sought in these texts a continuity with classical ideas but also a distinctive American understanding of the best sort of political system or “polity.” It was with such foundational documents that the quarrel began.
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Mr. Hayward traces the rift to a stroll in Claremont, Calif., in the early 1970s, when Berns said to Jaffa that the opening of the Declaration of Independence was one of the best things ever written, “but the ending was one of the worst.” Mr. Hayward quotes a contemporary observer saying: “And the fight was on.”
The Declaration, as we know, asserts that all men are created equal. For Jaffa, as Mr. Hayward explains, the profundity of the claim rested on the word “equal.” Equality is not something granted by man-made law but rather built into nature—it is “self-evident,” as the Declaration says. Jaffa argued that this truth lay behind Lincoln’s opposition to slavery and, more broadly, behind the justice of the Union’s cause. The Civil War, in Jaffa’s view, fulfilled the Declaration’s promise and brought a flawed and morally compromised Constitution into line with the country’s founding principles.
For Berns, though, “natural rights aren’t worth a darn thing without a government to secure them,” as Mr. Hayward puts it. The key passage in the Declaration, for Berns, was: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men.” A “strong but decent government,” Mr. Hayward writes, summarizing Berns’s view, “transforms natural rights into civil rights by a supreme act of positive law—in our case, the Constitution.” The words that Berns deplored at the end of the Declaration referred to the “protection of Divine Providence.” Protection, he might have said, comes from law itself: from the lapidary Constitution.
This divide is distantly visible in current debates in the Supreme Court, when a statute is said to threaten or secure certain rights. For Jaffa and like-minded thinkers, the origin of those rights is self-evident. For others, it is less so—one reason that Berns warned against letting natural rights play a large role in jurisprudence: The chances for rights-fueled overreaching was too great, he believed, threatening the Constitution’s practical wisdom.
Today’s confusion over what principles should guide our lawmaking—or regulate our society—make the Berns-Jaffa quarrel freshly relevant. And a quarrel it was, conducted in letters and in print, as Mr. Hayward notes. He sees Jaffa’s combative style and refusal to compromise as the biggest cause of the feud, though Berns’s stubbornness didn’t help. The animosity eventually burned itself out into strained civility.
Not surprisingly, alongside the differences between the two thinkers—which included debates over the political importance of personal virtue—existed a host of affinities, as Mr. Hayward shows. Both men, guided by Strauss, opposed value-free social science, believing that the study of society required not quantitative analysis but a philosophic examination of first principles and their application. They also faulted academic political science—“the sacrifice of political relevance on the altar of methodology,” as Berns said. And both rejected the pointed, if facetious, definition of a statesman as a politician safely dead. They instead elevated the role of statesmanship, defining it as a leader’s capacity to reconcile principle with circumstance in securing a just result. Leadership as skilled management did not suffice.
And what of the people whom statesmen must lead? Berns and Jaffa both recognized that democracy, with its susceptibility to momentary passions, presented a challenge to citizenship. Berns in particular noted how important it was, in America, to form the character of citizens so that, as Mr. Hayward summarizes, “they will give their consent to wise leadership and withhold it from fools, bigots, and demagogues.” Thus patriotism needs to be taught, and it is best taught by inculcating the principles of democratic liberty. Here too Berns and Jaffa would have agreed.
Mr. Hayward recounts his story with a generous spirit: He clearly admires both men, with whom he studied or shared think-tank affiliations. And he has an astonishing capacity to explain complex matters in accessible prose. By giving Leo Strauss such a central role, however, he inevitably slights other approaches to the founding era.
Forrest McDonald, for instance, overthrew Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of the Constitution by challenging the facts on which it rested. That project, pursued in the 1950s, was forensic rather than philosophical. In more recent years, scholars like Pauline Maier and Jack P. Greene have stressed the historical precedents and contemporary debates that shaped key founding episodes.
For Mr. Hayward, the Straussians—not just Jaffa and Berns but a cluster of scholars and public intellectuals—redefined American conservatism. He argues that, thanks to their work, the preoccupations of midcentury conservatism gave way to an outlook that newly valued the country’s first principles. Mr. Hayward sees the result as a more analytically rigorous and thus politically effective conservatism.
Here he overstates the case. Other conservative traditions remained robust—populist, traditionalist, religious, nationalist, communitarian—and indeed play a prominent part in our roiling political moment. They often emphasize the empirical over the philosophical, the wisdom of custom and lived experience over metaphysics. A comparative study of their current influence and effectiveness lies outside the scope of Mr. Hayward’s narrative. That said, “Patriotism Is Not Enough” offers an illuminating—and lively—episode from one valuable perspective. Who knew that an academic dispute could be so interesting?
—Mr. Hay’s biography of Lord Liverpool, Britain’s prime minister in 1812-27, will be published next year.
A Conservative Showdown
Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa, giants of American intellectualism, waged a war over the Declaration of Independence. William Anthony Hay reviews “Patriotism Is Not Enough” by Steven F. Hayward.
By
William Anthony Hay
April 28, 2017 4:40 p.m. ET
8 COMMENTS
The cliche has it that academic disputes are especially vicious because the stakes are so low. But now and then the stakes are high indeed. Over the course of several decades, two political philosophers battled over how best to understand American democracy. They were serious scholars with strong points of view and clashing personalities, so part of the quarrel had to do with matters of style and modes of expression. But ideas were the heart of the matter.
In “Patriotism Is Not Enough,” Steven F. Hayward presents a memoir of his own dealings with these remarkable men— Walter Berns and Harry V. Jaffa, who died on the same day in 2015—and traces their points of difference to a larger debate over the principles that guide American democracy. The book is a fascinating chronicle in itself and an instructive tour of important political precepts.
PHOTO: ALAMY
PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH
By Steven Hayward
Encounter, 280 pages, $25.99
WHAT TO READ THIS WEEK
Revisiting Walden; health care’s original sin; Martha’s Vineyard in mind; speeding up evolution; the lives of “infidels” in the Middle East; Paula Hawkins’s follow-up to “The Girl on the Train”; and much more.
At the heart of Mr. Hayward’s narrative is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the German émigré who taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Strauss looked to classical Greek philosophy as a source of wisdom rather than regarding it as a mere historical episode. A charismatic teacher, he shared with his students his concern—especially pressing in the 1960s—that Western society had lost its sense of purpose and legitimacy and faced a crisis. He believed that restoring the primacy of natural rights—rights that were God-given or embedded in nature—offered a path to recovery.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
Although Strauss looked to antiquity for political wisdom, several of his students and protégés, including Berns and Jaffa—who would go on to academic careers, Berns at Cornell and Jaffa at Claremont-McKenna—devoted themselves to the texts of the American founding. They sought in these texts a continuity with classical ideas but also a distinctive American understanding of the best sort of political system or “polity.” It was with such foundational documents that the quarrel began.
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Mr. Hayward traces the rift to a stroll in Claremont, Calif., in the early 1970s, when Berns said to Jaffa that the opening of the Declaration of Independence was one of the best things ever written, “but the ending was one of the worst.” Mr. Hayward quotes a contemporary observer saying: “And the fight was on.”
The Declaration, as we know, asserts that all men are created equal. For Jaffa, as Mr. Hayward explains, the profundity of the claim rested on the word “equal.” Equality is not something granted by man-made law but rather built into nature—it is “self-evident,” as the Declaration says. Jaffa argued that this truth lay behind Lincoln’s opposition to slavery and, more broadly, behind the justice of the Union’s cause. The Civil War, in Jaffa’s view, fulfilled the Declaration’s promise and brought a flawed and morally compromised Constitution into line with the country’s founding principles.
For Berns, though, “natural rights aren’t worth a darn thing without a government to secure them,” as Mr. Hayward puts it. The key passage in the Declaration, for Berns, was: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men.” A “strong but decent government,” Mr. Hayward writes, summarizing Berns’s view, “transforms natural rights into civil rights by a supreme act of positive law—in our case, the Constitution.” The words that Berns deplored at the end of the Declaration referred to the “protection of Divine Providence.” Protection, he might have said, comes from law itself: from the lapidary Constitution.
This divide is distantly visible in current debates in the Supreme Court, when a statute is said to threaten or secure certain rights. For Jaffa and like-minded thinkers, the origin of those rights is self-evident. For others, it is less so—one reason that Berns warned against letting natural rights play a large role in jurisprudence: The chances for rights-fueled overreaching was too great, he believed, threatening the Constitution’s practical wisdom.
Today’s confusion over what principles should guide our lawmaking—or regulate our society—make the Berns-Jaffa quarrel freshly relevant. And a quarrel it was, conducted in letters and in print, as Mr. Hayward notes. He sees Jaffa’s combative style and refusal to compromise as the biggest cause of the feud, though Berns’s stubbornness didn’t help. The animosity eventually burned itself out into strained civility.
Not surprisingly, alongside the differences between the two thinkers—which included debates over the political importance of personal virtue—existed a host of affinities, as Mr. Hayward shows. Both men, guided by Strauss, opposed value-free social science, believing that the study of society required not quantitative analysis but a philosophic examination of first principles and their application. They also faulted academic political science—“the sacrifice of political relevance on the altar of methodology,” as Berns said. And both rejected the pointed, if facetious, definition of a statesman as a politician safely dead. They instead elevated the role of statesmanship, defining it as a leader’s capacity to reconcile principle with circumstance in securing a just result. Leadership as skilled management did not suffice.
And what of the people whom statesmen must lead? Berns and Jaffa both recognized that democracy, with its susceptibility to momentary passions, presented a challenge to citizenship. Berns in particular noted how important it was, in America, to form the character of citizens so that, as Mr. Hayward summarizes, “they will give their consent to wise leadership and withhold it from fools, bigots, and demagogues.” Thus patriotism needs to be taught, and it is best taught by inculcating the principles of democratic liberty. Here too Berns and Jaffa would have agreed.
Mr. Hayward recounts his story with a generous spirit: He clearly admires both men, with whom he studied or shared think-tank affiliations. And he has an astonishing capacity to explain complex matters in accessible prose. By giving Leo Strauss such a central role, however, he inevitably slights other approaches to the founding era.
Forrest McDonald, for instance, overthrew Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of the Constitution by challenging the facts on which it rested. That project, pursued in the 1950s, was forensic rather than philosophical. In more recent years, scholars like Pauline Maier and Jack P. Greene have stressed the historical precedents and contemporary debates that shaped key founding episodes.
For Mr. Hayward, the Straussians—not just Jaffa and Berns but a cluster of scholars and public intellectuals—redefined American conservatism. He argues that, thanks to their work, the preoccupations of midcentury conservatism gave way to an outlook that newly valued the country’s first principles. Mr. Hayward sees the result as a more analytically rigorous and thus politically effective conservatism.
Here he overstates the case. Other conservative traditions remained robust—populist, traditionalist, religious, nationalist, communitarian—and indeed play a prominent part in our roiling political moment. They often emphasize the empirical over the philosophical, the wisdom of custom and lived experience over metaphysics. A comparative study of their current influence and effectiveness lies outside the scope of Mr. Hayward’s narrative. That said, “Patriotism Is Not Enough” offers an illuminating—and lively—episode from one valuable perspective. Who knew that an academic dispute could be so interesting?
—Mr. Hay’s biography of Lord Liverpool, Britain’s prime minister in 1812-27, will be published next year.
