Harry V. Jaffa is an author, and director of the Claremont Institute, a California-based Conservative think tank. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Yale and a Ph.D. from the New School. Jaffa's most noted book, Crisis of the House Divided examines the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. During the 1964 presidential campaign Jaffa served as a speechwriter to Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, and is credited with suggesting that Goldwater quote in his nomination acceptance address Cicero's famous expression, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue."
He is a student of Leo Strauss and is the leader of what are often called the "West Coast Straussians," a branch of the Straussian movement. The Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank associated with Claremont University , is founded to promulgate Jaffa's vision of statesmanship and his understanding of the American project.
Jaffa is no stranger to controversy and is roundly considered to be respected but extremely polarizing figure in conservative academia. He is a leading proponent of casting Abraham Lincoln as a conservative hero. Some of his works have been criticized for being overly flattering toward Lincoln to the detriment of historically documented fact. In the mid 1960s Jaffa debated Lincoln's meaning to conservatives in National Review with Frank Meyer, who took a critical role of the 16th president's abuses of civil liberties and expansion of government power. The debate occurred over the course of several articles and the controversy it raised persists to this day.
In the mid 1990s Jaffa again became embroiled in a heated controversy with several prominent legal thinkers in the conservative movement. Though he has no scholarly legal training of his own, Jaffa formulated what he called a theory of constitutional law incorporating the Declaration of Independence, sometimes referred to as Declarationism, in his book "Storm over the Constitution." The theory was critiqued and criticized for being overly philosophical and theological, rather than legal, despite being presented as a legal argument. His approach was critical of conservative legal figures including Robert Bork and William Rehnquist in a way that could be described as bitter and petty. During the debate, Jaffa exchanged heated words on the pages of National Review with Bork, who noted Jaffa's almost single-minded obsession with one single case, the Dred Scott decision. The debate effectively ended when Jaffa's theory was harshly critiqued by law professor Lino Graglia. The Jaffa-Bork incident was marked by what many, including Graglia, described ad hominem attacks by Jaffa upon his critics such as Bork.
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Last updated: 05-23-2005 01:08:12
