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Jaffa's New Birth: Harry Jaffa at Ninety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

Michael P. Zuckert
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Abstract

With the publication of Harry Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom, it is possible to see the overall trajectory of his thinking and to come to some assessment of it. New Birth redeems a forty-year-old promise for a sequel to Crisis of the House Divided. One problem, however, is that the sequel contradicts many of the claims in Crisis. These differences provide an ingress for reconsidering Jaffa's overall project and, in particular, his relation with his teacher, Leo Strauss.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , Spring 2009 , pp. 207 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2009

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References

1 Jaffa, Harry, A New Birth of Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2000), xiGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., xii.

4 Ibid., xi.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., xii.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., xi–xii.

9 Jaffa, Harry V., Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln—Douglas Debates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 314Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 319, 329.

11 Second Treatise, §§8, 54.

12 Crisis, 318.

13 Ibid., 323–24.

14 Crisis, 218.

15 For a fuller account see Zuckert, Catherine and Zuckert, Michael, The Truth about Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 240–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See Truth, 198–202.

17 Crisis, 4, 435 n. 21.

18 New Birth, xii, 73–74, 83–84, 500 n. 2, 505 nn. 17, 20.

19 West, Tom, “Jaffa's Lincolnian Defense of the Founding,” Interpretation 28 (Spring 2001): 279–96Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., 279.

21 Erler, Edward, “Philosophy, History, and Jaffa's Universe,” Interpretation 28 (Spring 2001): 245Google Scholar.

22 Jaffa, New Birth, 84.

23 Ibid., xi.

24 Ibid., 102.

25 Ibid., 73.

26 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 134–35Google Scholar.

27 New Birth, 120.

28 Ibid., 117–21.

29 Ibid., 119.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 120.

33 New Birth, 120.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 120–21.

39 New Birth, 146–49.

40 Ibid., 121.

41 Ibid., 124.

42 Ibid., 124.

43 Ibid., 150.

44 Ibid., 152.

45 Ibid., 142.

46 Ibid., 140.

47 Ibid., 148.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 124.

50 See Truth about Leo Strauss, 74–79.