The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy

...The sovereignty of the people, Lincoln argued, was itself an inference from the primordial tenet of human equality...

...However, Professor Jaffa, no doubt aware ofthis, at no point—not even in his essay "What Is Equality: The Declaration of Independence Revisited"—examines or explores major alternative interpretations...

...Equally provocative for many readers interested in our contemporary situation are his essays, "Tom Sawyer: Hero of Middle America," ':The Conditions of Freedom," and "Amoral America and the Liberal Dilemma...

...Why isn't it reasonable to assume that the Founding Fathers were engaged in a different order of business than the drafters of the Declaration and that to relate them is bound to present a distorted picture of our tradition...

...Nevertheless, most of the essays do deal with perennial questions of political philosophy and, in particular, problems long associated with the American experience with self-government...

...The Declaration of Independence and, in particular, the "all men are created equal" clause is susceptible to varied interpretations, not a few of which certainly appear as plausible as Professor Jaffa's...

...Yet, it should be noted, these and other dilemmas, involving as they do the questions of the limits of majority rule, the obligations of the majority to minorities, and the whole complex issue of "national" wills versus "local" wills are in-herent problems in democratic-consent theory...

...If Professor Jaffa's observations are only half right, we are in troubled times...

...The connection for Professor Jaffa, it would seem, is that national goals and commitments are to be derived from the Declaration of Independence...

...Among those of special interest in this category would be: "Political Obligation and the American Political Tradition," "Reflections on Thoreau and Lincoln: Civil Disobedience and the American Tradition," "Partly Federal, Partly National: On the Political Theory of the Civil War," "What I.: Equality: The Declaration of Independence Revisited," "The Virtue of a Nation of Cities: On the Jeffersonian radoxes," and a new "Introduction" to his previously published Crisis of the House Divided (1958), a work which dealsprimarily with the political thought of Lincoln and Douglas...

...One can only wonder, therefore, to what extent Professor Jaffa's theoretical approach would yield the same desirable and morally correct decisions in other conflictive contexts which involve "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God...

...Indeed, that is the immediate purpose of the document...

...Throughout his discussions of the goals and rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, particularly that of equality, Professor Jaffa shows a keen awareness of the "tensions" between Lincoln's "capacious" understanding of our national commitment and, as he puts it, "prejudices" which sometimes prevail "in a free society precisely because the government of such a society does rest upon the opinion of the governed...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 39...

...And this failure on his part is no small matter given his argument to the effect that the Declaration sets forth our basic goals and commitments as a people...

...Meyer's charge that Lincoln bears primary responsibility for the almost complete destruction of the "Constitution in its original form," specifically with respect to the relative powers of the state and national governments., Professor Jaffa responds in part: "The genius of Abraham Lincoln consisted above all in the clarity with which he perceived and demonstrated the inner connection between free, popular, constitutional government, and the mighty proposition, `that all men are created equal.' Questions concerning the construction of the Constitution were absolutely subordinate to the principle which gave life and meaning to the whole regime...

...With respect to this matter, Professor Jaffa, deriving our basic commitments as a people from the Declaration of Independence, perceives a profound inconsistency...

...Only in the remotest possible sense, then, can these essays be said to fit even under the broad title, "The Conditions of Freedom": nor can all of them very well be caught up under the subtitle, "Essays in Political Philosophy...

...In short, it breathes life into the Constitution...

...For instance, they run from an insightful article 'on the political theory of Aristotle ("What Is Politics...

...But there are clearly more important questions to be raised about Professor Jaffa's interpretation of the American experience than this...

...But it also meant that, as an indefeasible right of self-government, the citizens of eaclstate had the right to decide how the po lice powers emanating from their right o self-government were to be exercised That the exercise of the rights of the on( 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 197( resulted in the violation of the rights of the other created a dilemma...

...In his new introduction to the Crisis of the House Divided, he writes, "The Declaration not only implies what are the goals to be sought with the consent of the governed in a free society...

...What we have in fact is a collection of many of Professor Jaffa's major and minor essays and reviews, the vast majority of which were written in the last ten years...

...For instance, to Mr...

...As such, these selections range widely in nature and scope of concern...

...They are problems, moreover, that are not so easily and righteously answered once we move away from the issue of slavery...

...All but two of them have been published previously as articles or as contributions to edited volumes...

...to a much shorter essay review "What about the Dardanelles...

...One essay, "Lincoln and the Cause of Freedom," a rejoinder to an article by the late Frank Meyer, does provide some of the principal elements of Professor Jaffa's more embracing view of the American political tradition and, perhaps, should be read first by those readers unfamiliar with his previous work...

...From these remarks it is evident that Professor Jaffa's essays are, if nothing else, highly provocative...

...that is, whether it was or was not destructive of their own rights for any people to vote in favor of establishing slavery as one of their domestic institutions...

...all men are created equal' certainly meant that the Negroes no less than whites could not justly be governed without their consent, not by rules different from those by whicl white men governed themselves...

...A more "strategic" but related point concerns the status which Professor Jaffa accords the Declaration of Independence...

...written with the apparent end in mind of lifting the shroud that surrounded Churchill for more than a generation—which deals with the salient aspects of this ill-fated World War I British venture...

...Most certainly, the odds against the emergence of another Lincoln seem very high indeed...

...Or, in other terms...

...it also states a theory of political obligation...

...Yet we can say that Professor Jaffa's writings on the American experience must be understood in light of his broader theory which almost invariably takes us back to the "all men are created equal" clause of the Declaration of Independence, to the Civil War, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy by Harry V. Jaffa Johns Hopkins University Press $12.50 and to Abraham Lincoln...

...And, in the same vein, he writes of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, "The theoretical question was whether slavery was or was not inconsistent with the nature of republican government...

...Why, then, we can ask, didn't the Philadelphia Convention in drafting the Constitution unambiguously reaffirm these principles or ends in the Preamble...

...Put otherwise, a special burden falls upon him to show that the commitment as he interprets it (or even as Lincoln interpreted it) is more valid than alternative interpretations, particularly those that do not so readily yield up the same imperatives...

...In his view, it seems, the Declaration (continued on page 39) The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 35 J AFFA (continued from page 35) stands "above" the Constitution in the sense that the Declaration provides the underlying principles of the Constitution as well as the ends toward which our constitutional machinery should move...

...Here we cannot deal with the major essays at length because they treat their subject matter in some detail and deserve extended analysis...