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Too Good to be True?
A Reply to Robert Kraynak's “Moral Order in the Western Tradition: Harry Jaffa's Grand Synthesis of Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2009
Extract
I am indebted to Professor Kraynak for the generous things he says about my career as teacher and scholar. I have had vague hopes for some such recognition in a distant future, but not in my lifetime. Leo Strauss, who had virtually no recognition in his lifetime except from the circle he created around himself, is having a veritable renaissance, some thirty or more years after his death. I believe that, in the last several years, there may have been more new books about Strauss than about Lincoln (the most written about of all time!).
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References
1 He might have mentioned the first sentence of the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms” by the Continental Congress, July 5, 1775. These were the first words addressed officially by the American people to the world. They constitute an uncompromising denunciation of the very idea that there can be any such thing as a right of property of some human beings in other human beings.
2 Jefferson, in the famous Lee letter, listed among the sources of the Declaration “the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sydney.” Aristotle is at the headwaters of the tradition.
3 In Amid These Storms: Thoughts and Adventures (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1932), 39–47.
4 Ibid.
5 “The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism—nay, it is identical with nihilism” (Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], 5Google Scholar).
6 Strauss, , What is Political Philosophy? Aml Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar.
7 “Once you adopt democratic theory … you accept the proposition [that] if the people … want abortion the state should permit abortion. If the people do not want it, the state should be able to prohibit it” (Justice Antonin Scalia in Jaffa, Harry V., Storm Over the Constitution [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999], 115)Google Scholar.
8 According to Colleen Sheehan, of Villanova University, the passage in question actually occupies the mathematical center of the essay.
9 In World War II, the brutality of the Japanese towards POWs was notorious. It has been explained that the Japanese regarded anyone who allowed himself to be captured alive as beneath contempt. The Geneva Convention concerning the treatment of POWs would have been as incomprehensible in the ancient world as it apparently was to the Japanese. The enslavement of defeated peoples is perfectly intelligible from this point of view and helps explain why there was no antislavery movement in the ancient world.