How to Think about the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration

...That controversy over the deepest issues will continue will hardly surprise him...

...It is therefore distressing when Jaffa, in chapters 2 and 4, adopts the metaphor of life as a race with approval...

...Jaffa appends to the main chapters of the book what at first glance appears to be a highly extraneous essay: a polemical attack on the establishment of a "Leo Strauss Dissertation Award" by the American Political Science Association...

...Not the least service which Jaffa performs is convincingly to reassert the obvious-for example, that the American Revolution really was revolutionary, that the Founding Fathers meant what they said, as in "all men are created equal," and that Abraham Lincoln deeply understood the American political tradition, as most of us learned in school, and did not "derail" it...

...Clearly Jaffa, with his rejection of "indiscriminate egalitarianism,'' chooses the former alternative...

...Early in the introduction to this book, he writes: "In 1776 the United States was so to speak nothing...

...In Chapter 5 of Natural Right and History Strauss displayed with inexorable logic the consequences of the turning away from classical political philosophy in the thought of Hobbes and Locke...

...All of these "obvious" propositions have been so strongly attacked by an unholy alliance of ultraconservatives and radical leftists that not only our sophisticated universities but even our ordinary secondary schools scarcely defend them...

...For if there is nothing objectively good and only individual desires are real, how can we make any distinctions between desires...

...Truth and right, thought and action, God and man, higher and lower, macrocosm and microcosm, inform each other, and by so doing contribute to the perfection of the whole...

...It seems to me that there were such roots in classical moral philosophy and biblical religion, which along with modern liberalism influenced the Founders...

...Indeed they are somber...

...Perhaps my disagreement with Jaffa, if disagreement there is, rests on what it means to take a moderate political position today...

...Jaffa wishes to salvage an essentially liberal idea of equality from indiscriminateness by arguing only for equality of opportunity and not for equality of outcome...

...But when Lockean individualism becomes dominant, at least among the educated elite, all the errors of which Jaffa complains come to the fore...

...A truth, consciousness of which is as such a product of pure theoretical reason, becomes a right, a principle of practical reason, and of morally correct action...

...But to build that larger context that makes equality morally powerful and valid Jaffa turns to Aristotle, a most un-Lockean move, and to natural theology, a very tenuously Lockean move...

...us a glimpse of the vitality of our political heritage by letting us hear the incisive voices of those who created it...

...It is again one of the hallmarks of modern political philosophy that it abandons the idea of the good life and that it views man as essentially more an economic than a political animal...

...It is the conception of the individual as an isolated, self-interest-maximizing atom that our theorists and our politicians start from...

...Often it takes only the careful reading of the actual words of a Jefferson or a Madison or a Lincoln, or sometimes of a Douglas, Calhoun, or Stephens, to see through the distortions of the ideologues...

...Explicating the natural theology of the Declaration of Independence, Jaffa writes: Man remains lord of Creation, but his lordship arises from the fact that he, alone of created beings, is conscious of the whole, is open to the whole, of which he is a part...

...Slavery was manifestly unjust for it excluded the slave from the race of life and denied him the product of his own labor...

...Sympathizing deeply with that view, I would point out that liberal democracy never rested on Lockean assumptions alone, that it will be subverted if Lockean assumptions become all-dominant, and that only an effort to revive the powerful non-Lockean ethical and religious components of our tradition is consonant with a moderate political course, indeed with the survival of the Republic it self...

...Jaffa argues that the defense of liberal democracy in its classical Lockean mold is the moderate course...

...The notion of life as a race for the acquisition of material goods is the very essence of the non-political life, Plato's city of pigs, and the opposite of Aristotle's conception of the good life...

...Equality is certainly one of those values, particularly political equality, the right to participate in the public life that determines one's fate, about which Jaffa speaks so eloquently...

...But if slavery is unjust for this reason (Jaffa also gives better reasons), then all social and economic conditions that handicap some in the race of life are unjust...

...That Jaffa so powerfully raises the deepest issues as to the nature of our polity and our survival as a people is an accomplishment of a high and, given the debasement of political discourse today, almost unique order...

...Only so long as those older moral and religious traditions have remained socially viable has the true understanding of the Founders' teachings survived...

...The liveliness of the argument, which makes the book a pleasure to read, should not mislead us...

...Jaffa takes seriously indeed the hierarchy of God, man, and beast as the structure within which equality makes sense...

...He thus becomes a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm...

...Man's unalienable rights are a priori self-evident truths...

...For it is Locke who reigns supreme, whether among Old Liberals, New Liberals, or il-liberals...

...But does equality take its meaning from a context of moral reflection that gives elements of inequality of value their due or is it an absolute, the biological equality of all genes until proven otherwise...

...In 1976, the United States, having in a sense become everything, promises to become nothing...

...Instead we are faced with the ethical and political task of discerning those values that we as a people wish to govern our collective life and of articulating priorities that give those values their due...

...This statement is quite incompatible with the spirit of modern Anglo-Saxon philosophy which knows nothing of the whole at all...

...I would think that most of the theoretical and practical problems that we face today derive from the growing tendency for the Hobbesian and Lockean components of our tradition to crowd out all other balancing and mediating tendencies...

...This is a book whose value transcends the controversies in which it is engaged both because of the depth and care of its historical scholarship and because the force of Jaffa's argument carries us well beyond the mere refutation of his opponents...

...If it is a true expression of the teaching of the Declaration of Independence, then that document must have non-Lockean as well as Lockean roots, and a non-Lockean social environment to nurture its continued reception and appropriation...

...Since Jaffa clearly knows all this, we must ask how it happens that he virtually apotheosizes Locke and canonizes a Lockean doctrine of equality as the central element of the American political tradition...

...Man can by his thought grasp the principle of the whole and can thereby actualize the whole within himself...

...If, as Strauss said, "Today, political philosophy is in a state of decay and perhaps of putrefaction, if it has not vanished altogether," is it not because of the fulfillment of tendencies long inherent in modern political thought...

...Yet our distressing present and our uncertain future do not arise from our lack of a "goodly inheritance," but in part from the fact that we have almost forgotten what it is: "If 'we the people' do not know why we are a people, we cease to be one...

...How to Think about the American Revolution is a series of essays actively attempting to recover that goodly heritage through polemic and controversy with those who Jaffa believes have obscured it or failed to grasp it...

...He gives Robert N. Bellah is Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies at the University of California, Berkeley...

...Jaffa spends much of the book setting the record straight and clearing away the confusions spread by muddleheaded professors of whatever ideological persuasion...

...Equality is the central theme of our political tradition and Jaffa is certainly right to brush aside any argument to the contrary...

...But if pursuit of our individual desires is not the ultimate meaning of life, then mechanical equality in the pursuit is not the central principle of justice...

...It is the Lockean notion of life as a race, "the joyless quest for joy," as Strauss put it, that dominates our age...

...but it promised to become everything...

...But to emphasize equality exclusively is precisely to fall into the corruption of democracy of which Plato and Aristotle warned and of which the Founders and Lincoln were so sharply aware...

...Indeed, only equality of outcome for the parent could guarantee equality of opportunity for the child, so Jaffa's distinction itself breaks down...

...Such a view leads inevitably to the '' indiscriminate'' equality that Jaffa rejects...

...Equality must be tempered by the aristocratic principle of excellence or virtue and by the monarchical principle of justice (Jaffa brilliantly quotes Tom Paine as saying that in America "law is King") if we are to have a genuine republic...

...This essay is aptly included in the volume not only for the reasons Jaffa himself gives, but also because it raises certain questions about Jaffa's argument...