In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa argued that once it became possible for Lincoln to foresee the end of slavery, he prepared himself for a role in emancipation, and even, in the Lyceum speech, gave a “prophetic account of the coming crisis” casting himself in the role of Emancipator! Lincoln warned of future dangers that would confront the nation. These would be internal dangers, principally those stemming from mob rule, or more precisely the “spirit of mob rule.” The lawless in spirit—those who tolerate lawlessness—will be prone to become “lawless in fact.” Lincoln, of course, without direct acknowledgement, referred to abolitionists, who advocated violating the Constitution in order to emancipate slaves, whereas Lincoln’s avowed policy was one of prudence, which was to observe strict adherence to the Constitution which, when understood in light of the principles of the Declaration, had put slavery on the course of “ultimate extinction.” The greatest danger engendered by the “mobocratic spirit,” Lincoln insisted, “which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, [is that] the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the People.” What can unite them? What is the remedy Lincoln proposes? A political religion!
Let every American swear, Lincoln pleads,
by the blood of the Revolution never to violate the Constitution and the laws of the country or tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and sacred honor;—let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles in her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—…and in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.
Will this remedy be sufficient to insulate the nation against those ambitious men who would not be satisfied with “a seat in Congress,” or “a presidential chair,” those men of all-consuming ambition, who belong to the “family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle,” those destroyers of republics such as “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon.” The men of great ambition will not be satisfied to follow the paths of others but will seek new paths of their own making, because as Lincoln notes in his best poetic imagery:
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to the utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent to successfully frustrate his designs.
Lincoln’s “political religion” is essentially a question of political opinion. We saw in the previous chapter some of Lincoln’s attempts to expose the contradictions of Douglas’s campaign. But the volatility of public opinion—goaded on by Douglas’s “don’t care” policy—challenged Lincoln’s republican statesmanship and his defense of founding principles. Surely the political religion described by Lincoln, in his best imitation of a sermon from an elevated pulpit, would be ineffective against an Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, all of whom knew how to appeal to the sentiments of republican citizens. Indeed, it would take one of their kind—someone of great ambition—but someone who was willing to save a republic, not destroy it, to gratify his ambitions. Does such a man exist? Is human nature capable of yielding such magnanimity? Lincoln demonstrated that he was well-aware that ambition was neutral; that it could be served by freeing slaves or enslaving freemen. The man of superior ambition however—a godlike man among men—would be willing only to gratify his ambitions by serving just ends, by enlarging freedom for all, never contracting it for anyone, including those currently held in slavery.
Can the Magnanimous Man Save a Republic (or Even Live in a Republic)?
“At this point,” Jaffa argues, the Lyceum Speech takes “an unexpected turn…. We find the future author of the Gettysburg Address denying, in a wholly relevant sense, that all men are equal.” The “famous proposition” that “all men are created equal,” “[a]lthough it has given rise to countless differing interpretations,” no longer “indisputably” means that “the government of man by man, unlike the government of beasts by man” is “founded in any natural difference between rulers and ruled?” After pointing out that Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address called the “phrase ‘all men are created equal’ a ‘proposition,’ Jaffa explains that in the Lyceum Address Lincoln “tells us that there are men whose genius for and will to domination virtually makes them a species apart.” “Even as it is natural and rational for men who are equal to seek in consent the basis of political rule, so is it natural (and rational) for men who are surpassingly superior to seek in the unfettered acknowledgment of their superiority the basis of such rule.” They are the enemies of any political regime that they do not rule; this is especially true, of course, of republics.
Jaffa discusses Aristotle’s view of the “god-like” men who arise in political communities who are so superior in talents and abilities and for whom the rule of law would be unjust because they are themselves a law unto themselves. This is not unlike the passage in Matthew that was discussed in a previous chapter when it was reported that when the ’έθνη or pagans, “who have not the law [of Moses] do by nature (φύσει) what the law [of Moses] requires, they are a law unto themselves.” Those who are so superior by nature would therefore be treated unjustly if made to follow the law. Aristotle said that democracies typically would ostracize such individuals for specified periods or permanently to avoid the injustice of having someone who is a law unto himself be subject to the law. The superiority of such individuals is a clear and present danger to democracies, whether they submit to the law or seek recognition of their superiority. The biblical injunction, I say, conveys the same message.
Lincoln makes no suggestion of ostracism, because a regime based on consent, means the consent of all, and ambition, absent an overt act amounting to treason would almost certainly preclude ostracism and even then the issue of cruel and unusual punishment would arise.
Lincoln’s conception of the “nature of true statesman in the highest sense,” Jaffa argues, is the one “who can forgo the honors of his countrymen.” Describing Aristotle’s great-souled man, Jaffa avers, that “he alone is worthy of the highest honor who holds honor itself in contempt, who prefers even to the voice of his countrymen the approving voice heard only by himself. ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’” This last quote is from the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14, where the master, before leaving for a long absence, entrusts property (τούς ’ιδίους) to three servants (δούλους), giving 5 talents to one, 2 to another, and 1 to the last. The talents are thus proportioned 5-2-1, to each according to his ability. Upon his return the master found that the servant entrusted with 5 talents had traded and doubled his money; the second, having received 2 talents did the same; but the third, buried his 1 talent in the ground for safekeeping, saying that I knew you to be a hard master, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not plant. I was afraid and returned your mina. Those who doubled the investment received the praise quoted in part by Jaffa: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.” The third servant who acted out of fear and did not increase the property, was scorned by the master: “You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sowed, and gather where I have not planted? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.” There is, of course, much debate about the interpretation of this biblical passage, but there is little doubt about Jaffa’s use of it.
Charles Kesler points out that “to be a ‘good and faithful servant’ is not quite the same thing as the magnanimous man’s pride and pleasure in knowing that, compared to himself, ‘nothing is great.’ Strictly speaking, the magnanimous man does not conceive of himself as a servant to anyone or anything not even virtue, which for him is inseparable from the actions and contemplation of his own; like the gods, he is a benefactor, not a servant.” In using the biblical quotation, Kesler continues, Jaffa puts together the classical political philosophy of Aristotle and Christianity, thus suggesting that “Lincoln’s understanding of himself transcended that of a magnanimous man. Whether this transcendence was in the direction of the love of God or the love of the Good or both is a difficult question, which Jaffa did not explicitly answer.” Kesler suggests an answer, however, that was almost certainly Jaffa’s answer: “Certainly, the Biblical God is a god of particular providence and of moral actions, and so is a source of duties and a kind of model for statesmanship as well as salvation.” This, of course, is what Jaffa means when he called Lincoln “the prophetic statesman of a people, like Israel of old.”
Can Nations Be Magnanimous?
In what must be considered an extraordinary extension of the argument, Jaffa also contends that nations can be magnanimous. “The Lyceum speech,” Jaffa wrote, “recorded the discovery in the soul of ‘towering genius’ that the highest ambition can be conceived as consummated only in the highest service, that egotism and altruism ultimately coincide in that consciousness of superiority which is superiority in the ability to benefit others.” The same “towering genius” can characterize the people of a “superior nation.” Thus, Jaffa asserts:
Lincoln argues in the course of his debates with Douglas that the freedom of a free people resides above all in that consciousness of freedom which is also a consciousness of self-imposed restraints. The heart of Lincoln’s case for popular government is the vindication of the people’s cause on the highest grounds which had hitherto been claimed for aristocratic forms. In the consciousness of a strength which is not abused is a consciousness of a greater strength, and therewith a greater pride and a greater pleasure, than can be known by those who do not know how to deny themselves.
Strictly parsed, this means, I say, that Lincoln viewed the American regime as a true aristocracy operating in the only way a “true aristocracy” could—in the form of a democracy in which there were no pre-ordained class or caste barriers to the advancement of the natural talents and abilities of those who would emerge as the natural aristoi. Near the beginning of Liberalism Ancient and Modern, in the first essay, “What is Liberal Education,” Leo Strauss opines that democracy “is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. Prior to the emergence of modern democracy some doubts were felt whether democracy thus understood is possible. As one of the two greatest minds among the theorists of democracy put it, ‘If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself democratically. A government of such perfection is not suitable for human beings.’” Strauss does not name the second greatest mind on democracy, but every reader would recognize the quotation from Rousseau’s Social Contract. Whether Strauss is casting doubt on “democracy thus understood” by citing Rousseau, or indulging some obvious irony is a question. But we must also remember his statement in a later essay in the same book, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” where he says “that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism.” Perhaps the most important statement made by Strauss was in his “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” which was a reply to Alexandre Kojeve, Strauss’s long-time friend and Hegelian. (It was only learned after Strauss had died that his old friend had been a Stalinist and unapologetic apparatchik of the Soviet Union.) Strauss wrote that “[i]t would not be difficult to show that the classical argument cannot be disposed of as easily as is now generally thought, and that liberal or constitutional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age.”
We also cannot forget Strauss’s citation, in his own name, of Jefferson, that the best form of government is the one which “provides the most effectually for a pure selection of [the] natural aristoi into the offices of government.” In the sentence preceding the one quoted by Strauss, Jefferson had argued that nature or creation would have been “inconsistent…to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.” The existence of the natural aristoi is thus proof for Jefferson that “creation” has designed man for the social or political state! Man is by nature a political animal, and the best regime by nature is aristocracy. And since it is evident that “virtue and talent” have been “by nature…scattered with equal hand through all its conditions,” a system of equal opportunity allowing virtue and talent to rise from all classes would be most consistent with “natural right.” Scarcity in the ancient world prevented the actualization of the best regime by nature; “emancipation of acquisitiveness” was the necessary precondition for a regime that could adopt equal opportunity as its principle of distributive justice. Thus, the best regime of classical political philosophy became realizable only on the grounds of a radically transformed notion of the right to property and a scheme of constitutional government designed to protect the right to property. Even though the right to private property is wholly modern—and the “emancipation of acquisition” wholly alien to classical political philosophy—it is impossible not to see, as I am convinced Strauss did—the influence of Aristotelian natural right at work in the American founding, which, for the first time, held out the prospect that genuine aristocracy based on natural talents and abilities could replace the pseudo-aristocracies of birth and class that had dominated the past. Equality of opportunity—not the accident of birth—was to be the principle of distributive justice that would animate the American regime.
The following extended quotation from Strauss, from his essay “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, could have been written by Jefferson. From the discussion we have just unfolded, it is beyond cavil that it is written in the spirit of Jefferson. Let us read it in that spirit. Strauss, painting in rather broad—but revealing—strokes, says that:
It is a demand of justice that there should be a reasonable correspondence between the social hierarchy and the natural hierarchy. The lack of such a correspondence in the old scheme was defended by the fundamental fact of scarcity. With the increasing abundance it became increasingly possible to see and to admit the element of hypocrisy which had entered into the traditional notion of aristocracy; the existing aristocracies were proved to be oligarchies, rather than aristocracies. In other words it became increasingly easy to argue from the premise that natural inequality has very little to do with social inequality, that practically or politically speaking one may safely assume that all are by nature equal, that all men have the same natural rights, provided one uses this rule of thumb as the major premise for reaching the conclusion that everyone should be given the same opportunity as everyone else; natural inequality has its rightful place in the use, nonuse, or abuse of opportunity in the race as distinguished from at the start. Thus it became possible to abolish many injustices or at least many things which had become injustices.”
Strauss never mentions America, but there can be little doubt that he is referring to the American constitutional system, especially when considered in light of the remark that we have already quoted that “wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism.” Distributive justice and equality as discussed in this quotation is easily traced to an important Platonic source that was the subject of Strauss’s last book—Plato’s Laws. It is, of course, always dangerous to quote the words of a speaker in a dialogue because it abstracts from the drama or action of the dialogue. With that warning, I will quote from the Athenian Stranger who is the philosopher-founder a new city, not in speech, but in deed: “distributive justice” in this new city will be made “according to nature” [viz., natural talents]. This is called by the philosopher “the truest and best equality”—“the natural equality given on each occasion to unequal men.” Here, the Athenian Stranger, Thomas Jefferson, and Leo Strauss meet on common ground.