Harry Jaffa and the Idea That All Men Are Created Equal

Abstract

Harry Jaffa is remembered, above all, as a morally earnest man who was alarmed by the specters of relativism, historicism, and nihilism, and who battled to defend the classical idea of natural right (see, e.g., Uhlman et al. 2015; Watson 2015; Fornieri 2016). His defense of classical natural right was anchored in the proposition, held to be self-evident by the American founders, that “all men are created equal.” This, as his interpreters have noted, creates a puzzle (Zuckert 2009). “The defining principle of classical natural right,” C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook write, “is inequality” (Thompson and Brook 2010, 115). Yet Jaffa championed equality and natural right, and he considered the American regime and Abraham Lincoln’s statesmanship in the service of that regime to be quintessential models for the modern recovery of classical natural right. Jaffa’s originality, as Robert Kraynak observed, was “to claim that theDeclaration of Independence, as understood by theAmerican founders and applied by Lincoln, was the best and noblest expression of natural right in themodernworld” (2015, 169). This is the central theme ofCrisis of the House Divided, Jaffa’s magnum opus, a theme he claimed to have developed with more intricacy and complexity in ANew Birth of Freedom, a sequel toCrisis separated in their publication by four decades (Jaffa 2009, viii). Starting with this puzzle—the connection between equality and classical natural right—I briefly retrace central aspects of Jaffa’s argument, in Crisis and New Birth, about the salutary role the idea of natural equality might play in the modern