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Harry Victor Jaffa (October 7, 1918 – January 10, 2015) was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist, and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont Graduate University, and was a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute.
- Thomism and Aristotelianism
- Crisis of The House Divided
- A New Birth of Freedom
- Jaffa’s Shakespeare
Jaffa’s first book, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (1952), discusses Aristotle’s Ethics and Thomas’ understanding of it. Jaffa aims to help restore the Ethics’ importance for serious students of political philosophy, and to explore the tension between reason and revelation in the W...
Jaffa’s second book, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959), represented a radical departure in Lincoln scholarship. It is the book that secured his reputation. Jaffa himself came to think that his later book, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), ...
In the twenty-five years following Crisis, Jaffa had a change of mind about his project. The culmination of this change was the publication of A New Birth of Freedom(2000). Jaffa explains, [I]n 1959 I regarded the founders as condemning slavery from the perspective of a prudent form of modern natural rights. This, I then held was transformed by Lin...
For Jaffa, Shakespeare, whom he considered to be Lincoln’s teacher, was, intellectually, Plato writing after Christianity. Among Jaffa’s explorations in this vein are arresting discussions of Macbeth and Measure for Measure. Shakespeare’s English history plays, he argues, illustrate the struggle for civil and religious liberty that culminated in th...
Harry V. Jaffa. Harry Victor Jaffa was born in New York City on October 7, 1918, to Arthur and Frances Landau Jaffa. After attending Yale University and graduating with a degree in English in 1939, Jaffa entered the Federal Service in Washington, D.C.
Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015) was a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute, and the author of numerous articles and books, including his widely acclaimed study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (University of Chicago Press, 1959).
Biography. Harry Victor Jaffa was born in New York City on October 7, 1918, and died on January 10, 2015, in Pomona, California, his life thus spanning the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama.
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...
Harry V. Jaffa and Charles Kesler discuss Professor Jaffa’s decision to attend graduate school and how he first came to know Leo Strauss.
