Walter Berns and Harry V. Jaffa, RIP

[Valin]

Power Line:

Steven Hayward

January 11, 2015

 

By an extraordinary coincidence that summons up the idea of Providence, Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa both passed away yesterday. These two intellectual giants, graduate school classmates and students of Leo Strauss, carried on a long-running and sometimes bitter feud (“the feud that saved conservatism,” as I shall argue more fully in a couple days). This found me caught in the middle, as a student of Jaffa and a colleague of Berns at AEI.

 

I’ll have lots more to say about both men in the coming days here and elsewhere, but for now, let’s start with Jaffa’s description of the “new political science” that he learned from Leo Strauss, as he explained it in the preface to the 1982 (third) edition of Crisis of the House Divided:

 

(Snip)

 

Despite their theoretical disagreements, Walter Berns agreed with the conclusion of this passage. In our last ever conversation on the phone a couple years ago, Walter said to me in his gruff, baritone voice: “The proper method for the study of politics is biography!”

 

Stay tuned for more. . .

[Valin]

Nothing in the MSM about either of these two giants.

[Valin]

Walter Berns, 1919-2015
Yuval Levin
January 10, 2015

 

Walter Berns, the great political theorist, constitutional scholar, and teacher and mentor to generations of students, passed away on Saturday at the age of 95.

 

Berns taught at Cornell, Yale, Georgetown, the University of Toronto, Louisiana State, and elsewhere, but perhaps above all he taught through his essays and books on subjects ranging from the limits of the social sciences to the freedom of speech, capital punishment, constitutional interpretation, patriotism, and much more. All combined a deep understanding of political philosophy with a command of American history and a keen grasp of the prudential limits of both statesmanship and citizenship. He was a calm but firm voice of reason on the very subjects that tended to draw the most heated and least reasonable public debates through the years. And he always seemed to embody in his own life the virtues he sought to elevate in his work.

 

Some of Berns’s most influential and important essays were published in The Public Interest over the course of nearly four decades, and National Affairs (which is home to the complete Public Interest archive) has collected them here. You can also learn more about Berns and read much more of his writing at this website dedicated to his work, created last year by the Foundation for Constitutional Government.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Harry Jaffa, R.I.P.
Yuval Levin
January 11, 2015

 

Yesterday brought sad news of the death of Walter Berns, and today comes word from Claremont that Harry Jaffa has passed away at the age of 96. Two truly towering figures in American intellectual life for many decades, each of whom made us smarter about ourselves and more grateful for our inheritance, if often in quite different ways. What a loss all at once.

 

Jaffa was perhaps best known for his contributions to our understanding of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought. Even amid the staggering profusion of books about Lincoln — surely the most thoroughly examined American political figure — Jaffa’s greatest book, Crisis of the House Divided, easily stands out. It is a masterful work of analysis, filled with brilliant gems that have lost none of their shine in the 55 years since the book was published. Any scholar would be lucky to leave behind such a contribution, but Jaffa leaves behind much more than that. Although his other work tends to be overshadowed by his case for Lincoln, he was, among other things, a path-breaking and important scholar of Aristotle’s political thought and its implications, and his first book, Thomism and Aristotelianism, remains an underappreciated masterpiece. Shakespeare’s Politics, which Jaffa co-authored with Allan Bloom in 1964, also deserves an audience these days, especially for Jaffa’s chief contribution — an extended analysis of the opening scene of King Lear that stands as a model of how students of philosophy and human affairs can help draw wisdom out of great works of art.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Nothing in the MSM about either of these two giants.

 

Harry V. Jaffa, Conservative Scholar and Goldwater Muse, Dies at 96

ROBERT D. McFADDEN

JAN. 12, 2015

 

Harry V. Jaffa, who explored America’s founding in many books, but shifted modern politics with two speech lines that cast Senator Barry M. Goldwater as an extremist, abetting his landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential race and the birth of a zealous new conservatism, died on Saturday. He was 96.

 

The Claremont Institute in California, where he was a distinguished fellow, announced his death on its website, giving no other details.

 

A professor and author of political histories, Dr. Jaffa traced the nation’s origins to the philosophies of Aristotle and John Locke and analyzed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the contributions of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and other founders. He was also a Lincoln scholar, and his book on the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates is regarded as a classic in its field.

 

A disciple of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, Dr. Jaffa devoted much of his academic career to interpretations of equality, liberty, ethics, morality and patriotism, and he clashed with fellow conservatives over their meaning and the framers’ intentions. He took conservative rivals to task for ignoring “natural law,” which he called a concept of justice common to all mankind and a key to America’s foundation.

 

(Snip)

 

Nothing about Walter Berns