Jaffa’s Douglas

Abstract

In my view, Harry V. Jaffa’sCrisis of the House Divided is the most important work of scholarship published in the field of American political thought. The greatness of the book has to do, first, with its discovery of Abraham Lincoln as a serious political thinker and, second, with its positioning Lincoln as a founder superior to the founders of 1776, including even Thomas Jefferson. The latter project required a study of the principles of Jefferson and the other founders in their own right, and Jaffa’s book includes passages that add up to perhaps the best study in that regard too. Chapters 9 and 14 are the sections I have in mind. But the greatness of Jaffa’sCrisis also lies in two other less discussed qualities of the book. One is a mastery of historical context that is rare to find in what would otherwise be a book of political theory. Jaffa likely undertook the work to master the material because he saw this not as a work of political theory or political philosophy but rather as a study of statesmanship. In order to evaluate Lincoln’s statesmanship, Jaffa believed that his reader must be able to understand Lincoln’s choices as Lincoln saw them, which is to say that Jaffa had to make an otherwise obscure history available to his reader. But in order to make this history available, Jaffa had tomaster it. Perhaps historians of the periodwill disagree, but from my vantage point in 2022, the book is a humbling reminder ofwhat intellectual history can and should be. To put it differently, Jaffa’sCrisis demonstrates that scholars working in the history of political thought can do political theory and history at the same time.