Interview: Glenn Ellmers on The Soul of Politics | The New Thinkery Ep. 70

Welcome back to the new Thinkery on David Barr. With me as always, it's my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg? I'm Beeche.

Excellent. And Alex Priu, how's it going now? David, last few episodes you say, here's my good friend. And then you kind of stop me, Greg McBrayer.

And then you go to the new group. Who do we say? I think Greg David's sour on me. Yeah.

That's not true, Alex. I usually introduce you first. And oftentimes when I introduce Greg, I change his name to Greg or Samsa, the giant beetle in Kafka's book. I mean, I first wrote the Metamorphosis.

And Greg never picks up on it. And then I make a series of dung beetle jokes, which he still doesn't pick up on. I just thought he meant I'm good, is it morally good, unlike you? Yeah, well, you're that two world headquarters of nice people.

World headquarters of nice people, Ashland, Ohio. So we have a special guest for tonight's show, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute where we're colleagues. Glenn Elmer's is the author most recently of the soul of politics, Harry Jaffa, in the fight for America, which is out now through Encounter Books. Glenn, because we have a second for a fun fact, right guys, I wanted to share with you.

Glenn grew up in the lack of luxury. We have a second. Yeah, he grew up in the lack of luxury as the sign of the famed Elmer's Blue Empire. But the life of material goods when he discovered the resplendent world of political philosophy and went on to stick himself to one of the most famous American practitioners of political philosophy, Harry Jaffa.

Years later, Glenn would toil away in the bowels of the federal government, which is probably a story for another episode on the Bureaucracy. But how are you, Glenn? I'm good. I'm good.

So my little joke is I spent many years working for the federal government. But unlike Alexander Kojev, I do not have a double life as a spy for Joseph Stalin. So my academic career was much more boring. For whom were you a spy then?

No one. That's why I didn't have a secret life. Now Glenn, that's what a spy would say. It's when I have a quick question.

You don't have to answer this truthfully. But I've heard tell that at the federal government, you don't have to work that hard. Or that's my observation. So were you able to do a lot of reading on the job?

Or did you have one of those jobs we had to work? Since this is going to be broadcast publicly, I gave the taxpayers every dime that they were owed. And I never did anything other than a fish government work. That's good.

And I hear about wasteful government spending, right? So sort of I have an Iliac bureaucrat, turning away doing nothing. It'd be nice if some of those do nothing's on their free time, write a little political philosophy, maybe wrote a book or two. It'd be like, that would be a nice sort of, I don't know if you could start a department, like a sort of deep state philosophy.

So I feel that a bunch of straw scenes have been dropped. I have a number of straw scenes historically worked in the federal government, or at least on briefly. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, quite a few. Karen Lorde didn't do this while he was working. But at night, he did his plate of translation. Sorry, he did his Aristotle translation while he was a staffer at the National Security Council.

Karen's Lorde? Yeah. No, I didn't. I didn't.

Yeah. I have a thing that the problem inherent in the surface of the state and only in the surface of the state. It's hard to say. It's a deep state.

Yeah. So Glenn, we're here to talk about your new book on Harry Jaffa, which is wonderful. I encourage everybody to read it even if they, what's it called, David? I already said Greg, but since you're elderly and have the memory of a hummingbird, it's entitled the Soul of Politics, Harry V.

Jaffa in the Fight for America. I'm kidding, Greg is an excellent one. Find that in Counterbooks. In Counterbooks.

Thank you. Also Amazon, wherever you find your local book peddler. I assume. Right.

Book Manger. But Glenn Manger, just to start with one observation, we're all Strauss and Sierraed one feather or another. And I think yours is the first intellectual biography of a leading Strauss in my correct. And I know some people were going to intend to do something on Alan Bloom, or Buddy Eric Adler.

At one point he was going to write an intellectual biography, but yours is the first on any one of Strauss's leading students. I believe that's true. You know, you probably are aware of Steve Hayward's book, which was a more narrow focused volume that compared Jaffa and his great antagonist Walter Burns. But that was focused particularly on their interpretations of America and their dispute.

This is really the first full length book, intellectual biography of Strauss. I have found out through the great find that there are biographies now underway on Wilmore Kendall and also on Irving Crystal, either whom are strictly Straussians, although sort of quasi-Straussian both. So when those come out, it'll be interesting to compare some developing literature on the sort of generation of Straussians in Strauss and Warbit. Well, I have to say, I had a time to work through the whole thing but what some of the parts you gave us are suggesting we read and some of the other stuff that I poked around through.

This is a, if you're interested in Jaffa, and you have a read his work and you just want to get a sense of what's going on. I mean, I found it very helpful in laying out from the basic questions, some of his why he's concerned in Shakespeare, et cetera. My general appreciation of what you've done with this book is to show that this was a sort of ordered intellectual life that had purpose, drive, and a kind of trajectory that he was following and thinking through, which is to say it wasn't just a bunch of, you know, it was interesting in Shakespeare, it wasn't like a scholarly aside from his work on Lincoln or Aristotle even, but it all fits together into one sort of trajectory or vision. And to add to that really quickly, I think it's interesting because Jaffa was so huge-elistic and a lot of his writing, I don't know what that means, can you, what does that mean for folks?

He liked to throw punches, he used to try to box her, he was a boxer, we'll learn about that later, but it's somehow difficult to kind of put all of his pieces together and he has statements on Lincoln and then B statements on things like these two Lincoln books. And so it is kind of hard, you can lose sight of the arc of a scholarship if there is indeed such an arc. Right, right. And I also wanted to show, I mean, some people who only know him from his quarrels think that he was just a sort of kind of a superficial moralizer and just sort of quarrelist.

And I wanted to show also not just the continuity and the coherence of his thought, but also that there was an intellectual depth there that you might not know if you just know secondhand about some of his disputes. Can I back up for a second? I mean, look, we're gonna have people who are drawn to this episode because they know who Jaffa was and because they're aware of your book land, but some of our audience, you know my mom, you know who Harry Jaffa is, right? Compared to Barry Hoffa or Jimmy Hoffa, right?

So could you just, like, could you, like, if you said it to me, your mom didn't know Jaffa? Maybe. Are you implying she knew a lot of guys? I guess not very nice.

You said it. Well, it would be a much higher intelligence if you were the CEO. Oh, geez. So just Glenn, for the folks at home, can you just, like, give a sort of, if someone didn't even know who Harry Jaffa was, never heard the name, who is he?

Why should anybody care? And who's the mysterious man lurking behind him? Right, so I'm assuming people are at least have some familiar with Strauss. I mean, everyone who listens to this podcast probably knows Wheel Strauss was a great German emigres scholar who almost singlehandedly revived the series study classical political philosophy.

And among his very first PhD students was Harry Jaffa, Jaffa knew him before Strauss even got to Chicago. Strauss was taught at the University of Chicago for many decades. But before he arrived there, he was at the new school for social research in New York. And Jaffa arrived in Strauss's classroom in 1944, took a course on Kant's, which impressed him, and then took a course on Aristotle, which just blew his socks off, and became a very devoted, again, one of his first graduate students, followed Strauss to Chicago.

I think, I mean, Jaffa claimed that he took everyone, or sat in on every one of Strauss's courses for something like seven years. And it's probably well known for being among the most political, and the most sort of American oriented of Strauss's students. Certainly many other Strauss' teams were interested in America, wrote about America, but Jaffa was the most overt in applying Strauss and political philosophy to the understanding of the American regime, and even without any embarrassment to a kind of patriotic defense of the American regime. And although he was very aware of the tension between the philosopher and the city, didn't find in the circumstances he was facing that political philosophy prohibited him from engaging in a patriotic defense of the regime.

And that's kind of interesting. He has thisocratic term because he had this whole of a poet, you know, at least at Yale, right? Yeah, he was an English major at Yale. He already knew his two great interests were political science and English literature, and he did his undergraduate degree in English literature, and then went on to do graduate work in political science.

But he maintained that love of Shakespeare, especially throughout his whole life, and I think we're gonna get back to that a little bit later. But yeah, he was also accused of also, or accused or described as being kind of a poet of the American regime. And so we can talk a little bit also about the role of poetry and mythopoiesis in political philosophy and how that applies to America and Lincoln also. All right, everybody, before we go on any further, I think we should take a minute to step aside and think our sponsor, The Ancient Language Institute.

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I think I must have said something like The Ancient Language Institute, rather than The Ancient Language Institute, because let's be clear, there's nothing ancient about the institute itself. It's just the languages. The languages, yeah, they're ancient, right? We got land, we got ancient Greek, both coin and attic, and we have biblical Hebrew.

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So if you want to get your ancient language on, go to ancientlanguage.com. And now back to the show. I think you already took a job of just waiting out so the core facets of Jeff Stodd is you excavating your book, right? There's a concern with political action, right?

So I should be political philosophy and I think he sees Lincoln right as a sort of paradigm in bridging that gap. There's this relationship to poetry, the Shakespeare and the history and all that. So yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of crap to cover. So I don't know, do you guys want to grade you want to jump in?

Yeah, sure. So Alex going to just allude to this, but I suppose if one, there are a number of thinkers that are called to mind when one thinks of Harry Jaffa or there are a number of thinkers that he was sort of drawn to or of course it was Greer. Alex mentioned Lincoln, Shakespeare. I would say also Aquinas, John Locke and Aristotle, right?

And so maybe as we turn to one of our first themes for tonight, you can talk about his, he had an interpretation of Locke that was at some loggerheads, I suppose, with his teachers understanding of Locke. Then this seems to be a pretty big key to understanding his thought generally, right? Sort of he already, quote from your book actually here, this is on page 68 or 32, what's page 32? Where he sort of challenges the conventional view of John Locke and therefore the conventional understanding of America, if it's just if I have this right, this is from the editor of a posthumous collection of Jabba's essays, quote, the esoteric Locke you'd man as apolitical and possessed of rights by nature, but having no obligations by nature.

Man was from Locke's point of view a radical egoist. The American founders, as far as they placed any reliance on Locke, therefore incorporated this radical individualism into their notion of natural rights, particularly the right to property, which Locke emphasized was derived exclusively from self-ownership and provided no ground for obligations of morality of any kind. In other words, the founders could not escape the inevitable forces of modernity. The American founding was radically modern.

And here's where, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is where Jabba thinks that most people have Locke wrong, that in fact Locke does think we have obligations to one another, he's deeply moral, he's deeply political. And in fact, there's a great deal of harmony between Aristotle and Locke, just look at the beginning of the, or even the frontispies or the title of the second tree as the government where Locke talks about what the origin extent and end of civil government. So I assume that ends are back into politics. And so this is sort of chitingly rebuked, as you mentioned in our show, Locke's title, right?

That he sort of, that Jabba's that find some way to harmonize the political thought of John Locke on the one hand and Aristotle on the other. And then just to take it as that far there, I suppose, that Jabba sees the American regime as somehow embodying Lockeian and Aristotelian principles. Is that a good place to start? Can you give us some commentary on this?

Yeah, there's a little bit of a modification or clarification I would make that is Jabba does not totally reject the idea of an esoteric Locke, right? So orthodox or original Strauss-Eanism says, Locke had an esoteric teaching, that esoteric teaching was essentially Hobbesian, the Hobbesian operate on a sort of superficial level, rejected the idea of virtue based politics and the passion, especially the fear of death, dispenses with honor and other high-minded ideas. And that this concern with the passions, especially with acquisition, is what motivated the founders because they were influenced by Locke. And therefore the founding is low but solid.

And so there's two different pieces here. One is the degree to which the esoteric Locke is the whole of Locke. Natural writing history is not the only place that Strauss wrote about Locke. If you look at, for instance, the S.M.

liberal education, and there's other places where there's a more high-minded understanding of what Locke's intentions were. But the more important part from Jabba's point of view is the founders, the American founders, were not philosophers, they were statesmen, they were front of them, front of them white. And they read Locke and they read Aristotle and Cicero and Sidney and Moxiskew and many others with a political practical, prudential purpose. And so whether or not there was an esoteric Locke is sort of beside the point in terms of how the founders read them.

Alexander Hamilton famously referred to the impious Hobbes, the founders were clear and rejecting the low view that Hobbes had. And so the degree that Locke influenced the founders, Joff emphasized that you can't see that as, there wasn't a secret Hobbesianism that infected the founder, but he thought that that was kind of a crazy idea. There's one small point in this, I've always, this view that Locke and Hobbes are on the same page. I've always sort of, you remember the shredded mini-week commercials where like on one side, like it was like a sad, angry, just sweet, and you turn around and head sugar-coating.

I sometimes present this as that interpretation of Locke. That Locke is basically, they're both just shredded mini-week, but Locke is the side with the sugar-coating. You're sort of like, you have such updated current references that you're, listen, I pay a lot of money to get this harder and wisdom. So, that was your turn to jump in, I saw.

I mean, I actually want Glenn to continue a little bit because he's getting, well, that point, let me, maybe I'll supply another part of your argument in the book and you can ask a question. So yeah, I think this is a fair point, right? How do we know that, we need to understand the offices and understand themselves, but we need to keep in mind that they have their own interpretations. Why should we presume that, I don't know, Madison has a Machiavellian understanding of Locke or how the Asian understanding of Locke is a fair point.

Now, his ultimate synthesis of Aristotle Locke has to do specifically with the virtue of prudence, right? He allows for the political philosophy in many respects to be different. So, you can even have the habeasian side of Locke. But on the virtue of prudence, the claim, right, would seem to be that, well, prudence is a sort of permanent feature of human nature, right?

And so, you don't really get to decide that, but let me flip Jaffa's logic against Straussians on this point. Why do we presume that Locke's understanding of prudence is the same as Aristotle? Now, you didn't go into this, that depth. And I just don't know Jaffa well enough.

So, how does he marshal this view that Locke's understanding of prudence is essentially Aristotelian? Because I mean, I'm open to the idea, because I mean, one of the things I always, when I'm thinking about Locke, I always emphasize is, he's concerned with the education of the gentleman, right? And some of the features of that. And there's some modern traces, some ancient traces.

There's a real sort of mix, and it seems like you have to take that seriously. But on the virtue of prudence, I just don't know. So, I'll be interested to see that. Right, so Jaffa's argument is natural right is almost interchangeable with the idea of prudence.

That is, it's the application of justice, where the statesman like institution of justice to the greatest degree practically possible. And so to that degree, Aristotle's prudence is inseparable from Locke's prudence, because the virtue is always the same. It just has to adapt natural right to the circumstances in which he finds itself. So, the essay on education, the second treatise, the founders read these as compatible with a natural right understanding of political justice.

And they drew elements from that, and they drew elements from Aristotle. And this chimera of Locke's style is simply, I mean, that's not a word that Jaffa used himself. That's sort of a dig on him. You know, he kind of embraced the idea too.

And he didn't shy away from the idea of saying that, he actually does say, it's what's the leader of Aristotle was alive at the time of Locke facing the circumstances of a Christian Europe. He would have contrived something very similar to the second treatise. That is, what is the most prudent way of instituting just government under these circumstances? Wow.

Does that get at your point? Yeah, I mean, so, I understand that's a very specific part of Aristotle, right? It's a kind of specifically on this point that you want to the best of your ability to create, you could say, natural hierarchy within a regime, right? To the extent possible, right?

So maybe this is a good way to push back against the detractors of Jaffa, right? Which is that it's not pretending that beneath Locke you've got something like, you know, the desire for the polis or like, or, you know, an attempt in the regime to specifically like, you know, instructs people in sort of the education of the Nicki Maki and ethics or something like that, right? But mostly, or simply an understanding, maybe it's like what, book seven of the politics, right? An attempt to create something that a regime that at least gives an outlet or speaks to these groups is that, I mean, I think it was just a little more about, about the specific aspects of Aristotle involved in this.

Right, so the idea is not to look at the particular recommendations that Aristotle is making for fifth century Athens, but what are the underlying principles, right? You look at the different parts of society, you look at above all Aristotle's dictum that the city comes into being for the sake of life, but it exists for the sake of good life, right? And Jaffa liked to point out that that's, there's a remarkable parallel there to the Declaration of Independence, which speaks of safety and happiness. That's straight out of Aristotle, right?

The city comes into being for the sake of safety, for self-preservation, but it exists for the sake of the good life, for happiness, for would I money it? And so if you look at Aristotle from the point of view, from the high level of his principles, why does the city come into being? How do we understand political justice? What is the role of the statesman?

Even to some limited degree, the ideas of consent and even equality, surprisingly enough. If you look at, for instance, Aristotle's treatment of natural versus conventional slavery and what appears to be his not very hidden condemnation of conventional slavery, all of that points to a way that a prudent person dealing with life in American colonies in the 18th century, would adapt those principles to his circumstance? I think I'd like to jump in. So it's so good to have you on the show because this is like a question that I guess I'm just not clear on this in my own mind.

So I guess, so is the argument that Jaffa's making that, there is actually an esoteric lock and it is more Hobbesian, but that the founders read him exoterically. And so that somehow is, so maybe I'm not making this labor like, is the exoterical lock compatible with Aristotle? The exoterical lock isn't? So for example, what does one do with the strange, increasing frequency of the word prints toward the end of the second treatise?

What does one do with the curious accident that the chapter on state of nature is the 13th chapter of the two treatises? I mean, it just silly stuff like that. And I know that the point of the question. You don't do anything with that.

Okay. Because, yeah, so again, Strauss himself seems to be somewhat ambiguous on how emphatic he is that the Hobbesian lock is the only lock or the true lock, again, you know, his essay on liberal education in other places. But again, the point that I brought up earlier is, you know, the zucards bring this up. And I criticize the zucards to admire a lot for being a little unfair because in their book, they say that Strauss was the discovery of esotericism is a great accomplishment, right?

So, that's sort of been forgotten over the previous couple centuries. Strauss's discovery of that is great insight. And then they turn around and they basically call the founders dumb for not reading lock esoterically. Well, you can't have it both ways, right?

And again, the founders didn't present to the philosophers. They were a statement. They read the exoterror lock. They read the lock that told them the things they wanted to hear and I don't mean in a confirmation by its way.

I mean, in the sense of the political tools, the political principles, the political ideas that they found useful for establishing just government. I mean, there are some moments where it does seem like the films, at least in my very limited knowledge, where obviously, Federalist 51, right, where he's like, you have to apologize for obtaining not so pretty a picture of human nature, right? It seems like a moment like that, you want to say, they're aware that part of this at least, right, is very much meant to deal with, as they said, the sort of most modern advances in political philosophy at the time. Now, whether they have like Harvey Mansfield's Machiavelli reading, a Montesquieu, for example, or what they understood, I don't know what they do.

By the way, they were not the chocings or they did not have rose colored glasses about the demos. I mean, this is an old idea, and you don't have to be some great political theorist to know that a nation of philosophers is not to be expected. I mean, they were very clear-eyed and realistic about the limitations of reason politics, but they did think that a rational or reasonable and a just constitution was possible, but they weren't naive either. So how does this new infusion in political theories understanding of what the founders were up to, did it cause rank, I mean, did it rankle people in the academy?

Or is this really the start of when the troubles began, you know, which half over? Well, yeah, there's a lot of different ways to get at that. So I'm sure this is, I know, because I listened to some of the previous podcasts. The issue of historicism has come up many times, just like in two seconds, people do know it.

This is the idea of what we might call historical relativism, right, positivism that we're trapped within our own time and place and we don't really have any access to transcendent truths. And so our access to the great writers of the past is sort of limited. We can only sort of seem as artifact of the past, but we can't access wisdom across the ages because there are no sort of trans historical truths. That was a very dominant idea in the academy and Joplin's first book on the Lincoln Douglas debates, which came out in 1959, confronted this very directly based on what he'd learned from Strauss.

There's a little story, can I tell this little quick story from the book about how he had studied, I think it was his 34th course from Strauss on the Republic and you all know the famous inter-exchange between Socrates and Tristemachus and book one, where Tristemachus, this rhetorician says, justice is the interest of the strong, but it is justice is strictly conventional. And Joplin said, no, okay, that's very interesting. He sort of puts that in his pocket as something he learns from Strauss. And then about a year later, he's browsing in a useful experiment downtown Manhattan and comes across a copy of the Lincoln Douglas debates and is slipping through it.

And he's practically not done his ass reading this argument between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858 in the Senate debate in Illinois. And it's exactly the argument in all its essentials between Socrates and Tristemachus, between natural right and conventionalism. And Strauss is, that's when I realized that what Strauss had said about the permanent questions is really true. These really are, these questions about natural right, really are a permanent question.

And so he devoted his whole first book to making the case for a non-historical understanding of Lincoln for an understanding of Lincoln as a genuinely philosophic statement. And that really did sort of not be academy back. And he got a lot of pushback from that. He was, I mean, he really attacked some of the leading historians pretty hard and maybe a little too hard for their historicists.

But that was really a breakthrough in American story auditor. So I think you've tipped your hand about the next topic we're gonna talk about, which the Hegelian Jaffa is not historicist. So I think that answers the question of whether he was actually a Hegelian, right? But I had those suspicions.

I mean, it's very interesting because you lay out this sort of KG Jaffa, not KG, but reticent Jaffa, right? And we're willing to answer the question. Obviously wanting to provoke a discussion around this. It seems like in part because he thinks that that conversation will bring to life some questions.

So why don't you lay out for Jaffa's history, I think, right? The history and the development coming out of the Greek pollists to America, the 1850s, 60s. And then let's move on from there to say, whether this account is actually a sources. Right.

So Jaffa uses the word providential a lot. And he seems to indicate in ways that are sometimes a little ambiguous, but it comes up over and over again, that there is a kind of unfolding of history. And you go all the way back to when Jesus says, render interesting things around to God with his gods, the idea of religious liberty or the separation of church and state, which takes 2000 years to finally reach its culmination in Jefferson's Virginia Declaration of Religious Liberty. But the story really has to be told with the end of the pollists and the problem, the 1500 year, 2000 year problem that Christianity created.

So we all know this idea of the autoclonist city, right? So in the ancient world, every city had its own gods. And there was no conflict between your obligations as citizens and your obligations as a pious believer. Being the Athenian meant to worship the gods.

Athens would be a Persian, into worship the god of Christians. And there was no separation of church and state. The state or the city where the polls was the church. Christianity comes along.

And then especially when Christianity joins with the Roman Empire, you have for the first time a universal trans political religion. And so you have one god but many regime. And this launches a long, long conflict between hopes and embers, between priests and princes. And then when Christianity sort of fissures with the Reformation, you have interesting religious warfare.

People use the state to persecute heresy. We'll get to Shakespeare in a minute. But Japal, like the point out, basically all the Shakespeare and English history plays are just a story of civil war. Because you can't ever find some resolution of the conflict between the religious and civil authority.

And this finally gets resolved in the American founding with the principle of religious liberty. Sorry, Greg, you're raising your hand. It was like supposed to stop. No, sorry.

I was just, oh, I have to record in a hallway now. And so I was just waving at someone working here. Sorry. OK.

You're doing great. I'm sorry. OK. But Japal sees all of this as a kind of long historical process that leads up to America as the best regime in principle in the modern world.

Because it finally resolves this tremendous, tremendous difficulty which caused so much bloodshed through thousands of years of European history. And he seems to indicate that there's a kind of providence at work there. And he even hints at a kind of quasi-haggelian understanding of the unfolding history. But he always resists the idea that it's a scientific or materialistic haggelianism, which is why he always uses the word providence.

And this, in a way, prevents you from getting into what kind of scientific or Marxist tyranny, where if you say that the unfolding history is God, not science. It spares you a lot of trouble. Does he have in mind to cool at all in that regard? Not so much to cool.

So one of the reasons I think Japal does this, constantly talking, not constantly, but often talking about providence, about the unfolding of history, about a kind of directional purpose, is he sees the immense power of the idea of progress in the modern world. And he wants, in a way, that political philosophy sometimes do, to use the dominant or authoritative opinions and bend them to something beneficial or useful or just. And so he wants to sort of redirect the idea of progress, which is so powerful in the modern mind, away from Hegel and the Vexchdot and the bureaucratic administrative state, and say that no, it's the principles of the founding that represent the culmination of history. And I just, one of those things that strikes me and maybe this is resolvable, but I feel like I see a tension between his emphasis on the importance of states and Lincoln and prudence on one hand and providence on the other.

In other words, I mean, I'm not sure maybe Alistair can back me up here or correct me, but it seems like we need prudence precisely because history is radically contingent and dependent upon individual human beings to affect good in the world. And if we're pressing this, we need human prudence precisely because of a lack of providence. So how does Japas wear this tension? Or maybe I'm wrong if I see it.

Well, if we see the direction of history as part of God's plan and we recognize biblical God as being ultimately unknowable, that means we don't have scientific knowledge. It means history is not deterministic, at least from our point of view. And so prudence and statemanship always remain possible because human freedom is always remain present. If you take the direction of history out of God, out of the will of an un, sorry, an unknowable God and make it scientific, make it subject to laws that we can understand, then you open the door to Marxism and manipulation of those historical laws and ultimately to a kind of scientific bureaucratic tyranny.

That's the difference between providence and sort of scientific historicism. That's needed. I'll maybe push back a little bit on the providential aspects. I'm not, maybe this is Japas view, I don't know, but just sort of asking a question out.

It seems like at some point, when you're quoting Japas and you're kind of explicating his view, none of this had to happen, right? So that there isn't the same sort of necessity governing it. And in fact, one of the ways you put it is you could just understand it as, oh, shoot, I lost my page. No, we know there it is.

A prudent version of historical destiny, which is another road as opposed to the road of Marx, for example, or a Calhoun, right? Which seems to mean that we're not for the great statesmen and philosophers. Things wouldn't have come this way. So that the providential aspects, and correct me if I'm wrong here, or Japas' invocation of providence, is that meant to be a sort of, maybe in those sense of Federalist 37 when, as it says, somebody who's like just thinking about it, we'll say, wow, this is amazing.

I can't believe we pulled off this Constitution. Right. If you're a man of pious reflection, I just need a hand of the Almighty, you know, Governor. Right.

Who's not who made a think about this? Absolutely. Right. Right.

So I mean, even if you're, so the question of miracles, of extraordinary events is something that always comes up in the city of Strassen political philosophy. But even if you're a strict 100% rationalist, there are, there do seem to be amazing things that happen in history of the world. And the combination in 1776 of all these amazing statesmen in a brand new continent with the opportunity to begin a new nation on new principles is really in a sound. I mean, you know, the idea of the miracle of Philadelphia is a very longstanding sort of meme.

And it's very easy, even if you're only mildly inclined to believe in some higher power, it's very easy to say, wow, that's a pretty amazing coincidence. You almost have to believe in God to think that's something like that could have happened. And so what Japas is showing is the developments are the unfolding of history open up at least a possibility for pious believers to see the hand of God in this thing. Yeah, right.

So yeah. I mean, my tendencies, I see those sorts of phenomena. And I'm like, yeah, history might just be a series of like, it's like a Mr. Magoo cartoon where like you're about to walk off of it and buildings like dang.

And a beam comes and takes you down to the ground. And you're like, you know, every, you have no idea what's happening, but you happen to get there. And you know, at any given moment, a Lincoln could come along and savior or, you know, it could end up with just a bunch of heads rolling down stairs like Aztecs, right? It's actually talked earlier.

That's not a history. No. Right. Yeah.

And again, just to emphasize this point, from our point of view, from the point of view of human freedom, there is no determinism, right? And so that is important. That's why providence and providence of an unknowable God is very different from a scientific historicism that operates according to laws that we can know. Those are two very different ideas.

I mean, personally, you know, I do think there's something compelling here, right, about the providence, the Hegelianism. I mean, I do think, and I think this is where to get back to his reticence on this question. I think it's a helpful resident, reticence, because it forces you to ask this question of, look, you're living in 2021, right? And people got a lot of complaints.

But we never had it so good, right? There's access to all sorts of stuff. There's comfort, medicine, all this stuff. It's going to, you can really spend a life, you know, working for the deep state writing books on Harry Jaffa, if you want, right?

There's place for that. Whereas, ages ago, you'd have been one of the high poppies that the entire would have knocked your head off or something like that. And I do think it's a challenge to really ask yourself, in those moments where we do feel like a swelling of gratitude, to ask yourself what that expectation or hope is, what's the operating hand there? Maybe his reticence was meant to, do you think his reticence was meant to provoke questions like that?

Or, is there questions I ask myself? How many of you like? How many figure out being a therapist? Yeah.

Well, I'm certainly not going to be your therapist. But, you know, for instance, it does sort of help you think about, so there's this idea that Jesus said in the Gospels, 2000 years ago, render and disease, or whatever he's rendering, was that in fact a kernel of an idea that took 2000 years to germinate? And how do we explain that? I mean, it could just be, you know, what you were saying a moment ago, history is just one damn thing after another, it could have gone a different way.

Yeah, that's possible. On the other hand, again, even if you're kind of a skeptic, they're do seem to be amazing things that happen in history of the world. And so, I think Japa, at the end of the day, left open the question of providence. He certainly didn't consider himself any kind of Dr.

Nair Hegeling. And he emphatically rejected the idea of any kind of deterministic historicism. So, and last question on this topic. Yes, as far as this comes down to prudence and like, practical or political action, right?

Is this a way of saying that though it is a kind of history, and there are these sort of historical arcs that override regimes that are occurring, that ultimately it's sort of dependent on the political actor and informed by the regime. Is that a kind of tinge of Japa's sort of risk to tele-ism, the regime dependency, you could say, of these actions? Or, because that's, I mean, so one reading of Strauss, right? Or I think it's clear reading of Strauss's.

Here's his story, says some historicistic mistake, is that they, you know, think everything's historically determined. Yes, certain things are determined by historical entities. Those things are the regime, but the regime is the primary phenomenon, the ancient phenomenon that we're covering. And what you really understand is that your ideas are less so historically determined, more so regime.

Is that sort of his way of treating those two threads? Is looking at historical arcs, but reducing it to political, practical actors? Yeah, that's part of it. And again, another piece, and I alluded to this, not to Pridettis, you always have to be part of state and chip and part of Prudence or the political boss, which is recognizing the dominant opinions of the regime in which you live.

And certainly the idea of progress is a very dominant idea. People overestimate the power of science as a progressive phenomenon. And they apply it to all sorts of things that are non-scientific. But rather than confront that headfirst, Japha thought that he would sort of bend or modify the idea of progress and push it in a more beneficial direction.

So, yes, states and chip is always using the endoxo of your regime. And instead of trying to, you know, fire at the point blank, bend them toward natural right. You should explain for the folks how what endoxo is. I think you forgot what in the audience.

You just talked about it. Yeah, I'm just trying to a bunch of stress and geeks like myself, right? So the idea is every civilization, every society, every culture has certain dominant ideas that they have. You know, in medieval Europe, it was, you know, the authority of the church was pretty much unquestioned in ancient Greeks.

You know, they had different sort of dominant ideas about its curiosity of the Greek life as against the barbarians. And the gods of the city were unquestioned for ordinary people. And in the modern world, again, partly because of the power of modern science, there's a very, very, very powerful belief that progress sort of defines history. You're the beneficiaries of thousands of years of progress.

And that idea is over-estimated. But rather than simply shouting people to reject the idea of progress, which is where we're going to go anywhere, Joffa wanted to bend the idea of progress toward a more aristotelian credential understanding, by calling it providence that leaves open around with human freedom. Does that explain anything a little better? So before we turn to the East First West Coast, which I know a lot of listeners are thrilled about, I wanted to touch on another thinker that loons, that loons in the background, but also the foreground, especially early on, and Joffa's working on Shakespeare.

So in 1964, he publishes Shakespeare's Politics with his first-while-buddy Alan Bloom. And it's hard to pick up a Jaffa essay on anything in which you don't find some illusion or explicit reference to Shakespeare. But he permeates everything. And so in addition to kind of writing interpretations on single place, he has this wonderful essay.

I think everybody should read the kind of awesome title, Comedy and History and Interpretation of the Shakespearean Universe. It's a huge entree into Shakespeare's cosmos. So why was Joffa kind of attracted to Shakespeare and what used to he make of the plays? How were they useful to him in kind of explaining statesmanship and also the American regime?

Right. So one piece of it, there's sort of two different sections. One is the English History Players, which he thought were a wonderful demonstration of the problem of divine right of kings, the theological political problem that had afflicted Europe, and it shows it very starkly and sort of sets up the solution that Locke and the founders would achieve with the printable of religious liberty. The phrase he would like to use when talking about problems of the English monarchy that Shakespeare describes is they could never combine legitimacy with competence.

So the heir to the throne might be the person who has unquestioned right under the principle of divine right of kings. He is in the bloodline. But he might be incompetent, a weak lane. There's a couple of great Shakespearean plays with totally weak, pathetic figures on the throne.

The War of the Roses, which is that Henry IV, I forget. Or he might be a tyrant like Richard III, right? Whereas the person who's competent has no legitimate claim to the throne, or he has the claim in it. And so you have civil war.

And so the Shakespeare History Players are a wonderful demonstration of the political problem that Shakespeare sees, but that no one in his lifetime can quite solve. And that's connected to another piece, which is Shakespeare as a kind of alternate Machiavelli. So the other problem, the other way of Shakespeare looks at this rather than sort of straightforward historical place is in the comedies and the tragedies in which, as dropacies, Shakespeare is in a beautiful artistic and very deep philosophical way playing around with the idea of the philosopher and politics, or the philosopher's role in politics. And some of the really most interesting plays like Measure for Measure, especially, but also the Tempest and others.

This comes up in one of the comedies is, what would happen if you could get a philosopher king, right? And the reason that they're either comedies or tragedies is it doesn't ever really work. And so Machiavelli's idea of conquering chance, right, which is the way Machiavelli, again, for people who don't know, Machiavelli sees the problem of sort of theology, of Christian theology, or theocracy, I'm sorry, I misspoke, of Christian theocracy producing either excessive weakness or excessive oppressiveness, right? So, princes either are too otherworldly, concerned with the like beyond and they neglect the demands of politics, or they try to use political like to impose doctrinal exactitude, right?

To punish heuristics. And Machiavelli says, well, this is a mess, but you've got to just get Christianity, and along with it all just concerned with virtue out of politics and just focus on what we can do practically. Shakespeare sees the same problem, and is also playing around with this idea of how a philosopher would conquer chance getting to politics, but again, it never really works. The philosopher's entry into politics always ends in either comedy or tragedy.

And we can get into some of the specific examples of that, but both of these point to the problem that Shakespeare sees in a more humane way than Machiavelli does. Shakespeare doesn't ever wanna go down the road that Machiavelli does, simply throwing Christianity and virtue out the window, but he doesn't ever quite come up with his own solution. He never writes on the Tempest though, right? Jaffa?

I remember others' passage in your book where he regards the Tempest as Plato's Republic and measure as the laws. That's right, that's right. The measure for measure essay is where all this comes out very nicely. People don't know the play, it might not be worthwhile to get into this too deeply, but they can pause, go listen to the increase episode on measure for measure, pick right off where they left off, sorry, go ahead.

Right, so the Duke sort of like Ramiro Dorko, not Ramiro Dorko, what's his name? Abscons from the city because it's a complete mess. In terms of... No, in terms of...

He's like Chesley. Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry. And where Chesley turns the city over to Ramiro Dorko, Duke of Vienna turns it over to Angelo, who imposes incredibly strict new regime, because the city had basically fallen apart and biker catered into either complete licentiousness or excessive moralizing. And so the idea is the Duke leaves, sees what would happen, and then comes back and fixes up everything very nicely in a way that's really not quite believable, again showing the limitations of how the philosopher would enter politics.

But Shakespeare is again playing around with this idea of what would happen if we could conquer chance, but always in a comic or tragic way showing that it would never really work. How does... Sorry, going on, just a question. You mentioned Machia Bell in his context and I think you said something like Shakespeare as an alternative Machia Bell or something like this.

Right, right. So can you explain that maybe a little bit? Right, so Shakespeare... So Machia Bell's idea was if we're going to get Christianity out of politics and focus on accomplishing, just focusing on what politics can accomplish, one of the things we need to do is have a much more through ambitious attitude toward nature.

In a way, the classics were very, I don't want to say hopeless with the right word. The classics were from Machia Bell's point of view, a little too impressed by the power of nature. They thought people couldn't do very much, nature does what it does, and we just sort of muddle along. And Machia Bell said, okay, no, look, we can actually do a lot more.

And already you're seeing the beginnings of scientific revolution in optics and engineering and other things, you know, in bacon and other early modern strongness. And so the whole early modern project of which Machia Bell is a part is, look, we can harness human knowledge to improve our lives. We can conquer nature for the relief of man to save and conquer chance, right? We don't have to be so, so slaves to nature's whims.

Shakespeare sees that same idea, but he's not willing to take the sort of hard, might say, merciless Machiavellian attitude, which involves chucking Christianity out altogether. And so Shakespeare, I don't want to use the word playing around, but Shakespeare's plays are kind of playing around with this idea in a sort of artistic way that wants to combat this problem with a more humane, less-real-politic attitude. So he doesn't quite want to go down the road that Machiavellian opens up, but he doesn't see any better alternative. So the comedies and the tragedies, some of them are exploring this scene in a way of what would the alternative to Machiavellian be?

But as far as as John is concerned, Shakespeare explores this wonderfully, but never quite settles on or finds an answer, which we come a little bit later with the principle of religious liberty in American colonies. Very interesting. Now in our earlier discussion of religion could time well here in one way, I have to sort of see how these various bits fit together or don't fit together. Sort of interesting.

Yeah, very interesting. Sorry, before we get to the last theme of the show, is there anything you wanted to say about his book on Aristotle and Aquinas? Come on. We don't talk about that in our run show, but people should be aware of that book.

And what's interesting about it? As some folks consider it, certainly his most philosophic work, but his best work simply. It's a very philosophic work. It was his doctoral dissertation under Strauss.

He was an analysis of Aquinas' commentary on the Nicomachean ethics. And Strauss, sorry, and Japa there is in a way very aggressive in saying that Aquinas misrepresents or misunderstands Parasod. And it's still a very interesting work. It's still cited.

I found in my book, and I say it was recently, I think, 2018 or 2019, which is still citing that book, which was published in 1953, that is one of the authoritative commentaries. It's pretty impressive after 70 years or whatever that is. Does Japa have any view on whether or not that misrepresentation of Aristotle's intention on Aquinas' part is a busy detective that Aquinas is writing us a character and trying to show careful readers that in fact there are some problems that Aristotle helps us to see, that maybe his endocs obscured. Right, so Japa then ended up, so Japa changed his mind on a couple of things.

One of the things I like to bring out in the book, and I think it's creditable to him, is that he was willing to change his mind when he came across new evidence or thought something through. I mean, I had a very long career, with 96 and had a scholarly career almost 70 years. You'd hope he changed his mind over that period of time on a few things. But he changed his mind on the Aquinas and Aristotle question.

When he wrote his book, Japa thought that Aquinas was trying to make Aristotle safe for Christianity. And then later he came to see that Aquinas was in fact making Christianity safe for Aristotle. And as he came to see Aristotle as a philosopher in his own right, and that he tried to bring out the most humane, the most just elements of Christianity and show them as compatible with Aristotle. And so he really came to appreciate that Aquinas was operating within the confines of the Theocratic country or three-cratic civilization.

And he could only say so much. And so it was really later on when he came to appreciate esotericism, the esotericism that he learned from Strauss, and began to apply that to Aquinas that he began to have a much greater appreciation. Aquinas wasn't misrepresenting or misinterpreting Aristotle. He was discussing Aristotle in the most prudent way he could for his audience.

Somebody could do a lot of work there to tease out what Aquinas actually might have been up to then in light of that change of heart of Japa. So I think we got to get to the big. I was gonna say we got to pay the folks for what they came for, right? They're a lot of famous battles.

It is. It's here versus the South. You got Protestants versus Catholics. You got Glenn's family versus horses.

But the biggest one of all is East Coast versus West Coast, Strauss. Now just to be clear, yeah, it was right. Well, there's no question about that. Come on guys, I can't have you on this show.

We're not expecting to say, of course the West Coast is right. It's not even a question. All right, so what is this? And how did it become?

Let's talk about it again. What are they? What are they? Yeah, the beginning of the world.

Well, they're people just like you and me, Greg. Let's try elementary. I'm fly over to the country. What is it?

What is it? What is it? What is it? I felt flat.

I felt flat. Was Japa aware that he was building a school? Was that in time? Yes, he was.

He was. He was. He saw himself very explicitly as carrying on Strauss's project. So he took Strauss very seriously.

When Strauss talked about the crisis of the West, and the crisis of natural right, when he talked about, you know, he said to Kojab that the world homogenous state would begin to philosophy on Earth. I mean, Japa really did see postmodern philosophy. And he says this many times, as a threat to both biblical morality and morality simply, and to philosophy. And he thought that the obligation of a political philosopher in our present circumstances, in view of the nihilism and radical atheism and radical skepticism of postmodern philosophy, he saw that the political philosopher had an obligation from the point of view of philosophy to a lie with the concerns of the citizen to address the crisis of the West.

And so he thought that in the present circumstances, the political philosopher as such had an obligation to be more political than he might in a different time and place. And in that, he differed from a lot of the East Coast dressing, so in other factions, Strauss's students. So Japa was based in Vermont, California. That's where West Coast dressing come from.

A lot of the other Straussians who made their home in other schools, especially Boston College, but other places like St. John's, where King can be known as East Coast dressing, and this became the division. But many of the other. He had the kind of.

Much less political. And also just like the way back, right? And it was like Cornell BC Harvard with Mansfield, right? It was like a real cluster of it.

Yeah, yeah, right, right. Can you, so I mean, a lot of the folks are here to hear about this, since they know this. Can you give us Glenn just a basic, what are we doing? So obviously we're talking about East Coast dressing, West Coast dressing, and the idea is there's this little philosopher you already mentioned, Strauss, and some of his students congregate in the West Coast, and some of them congregate in the West Coast.

It really is Japa come one hand. Right, right. Like if you were to give us sort of objective, what's the difference between the so-called West Coast and you sort of lay down a little bit at a basic level? What was there between West Coast and East Coast folks?

So I think some of the East Coast droughts and lets, you know, just to name names a little bit, give people some context. So what they know we're talking about, Alan Brown, you mentioned. So Japa and Bloom have been friends for a long time. They could call out through this book on Shakespeare's politics.

But sort of like the way Reagan felt about the Democratic Party, Japa thought, and again, you know, take this for what it's worth. This is from his own perspective. He thought he had remained the same. And that Reagan used to say, I didn't need the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.

Japa used to think, I didn't need my friends. They left me because he thought that they had sort of wandered off to, you know, he thought that Bloom, for instance, who had been his friend, went off to Europe and became enamored with Hegel and Cogeve, and became himself a kind of a radical post-modernist. Other people like, you know, Pangal, and by the way, Dauphin Pangal had this tremendous battle in the Claremont Review of Books in the mid-80s, but they remained friends. I mean, a lot of friendships broke over these debates, but Pangal at least and Japa remained pretty cordial.

Another figure is Joseph Cropsy. You know, people don't know that Japa and Cropsy were childhood friends growing up on Long Island. And that Cropsy had started out as an economist. And Japa brought Cropsy over and introduced him to Strauss and brought him into political philosophy.

And then Cropsy went on to become Strauss's colleague at the University of Chicago and co-edited the Purple Bible, right, the history of political philosophy, that great collection of essays. But some of the famous East Coast Rousins are Bloom, Cropsy, Pangal, Harvey Mansfield calls himself an East Coast Rousins, but in a way, I consider him a little bit different in the sense that he's always been very interested in America, writes on political themes in a way that I think some of the radical Eastern Straussians work in some ways, very explicit about saying the political philosopher maybe begins in the marketplace where the paintings like Socrates does, but ultimately leaves the moral political life behind there's a life that's radically separate from the regime. And they really emphasize the destruction or the tension between the philosopher and the city, almost regardless of circumstance. And Japa took a very different position.

I mean, on just the Bloom, Cropsy F thing, Williams Burns told me a story that he went off to France to study with Cropsy F for a year or something like that. And he came back and he was just like, you know, I need to do any. And I was like, I had to like calm him down to like, somehow it's still kind of, so I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't think Chavez, making anything up there. That's not like, it's not like it's.

By the way, there are letters. And I haven't looked at all of them, but I did look at, so I went to the University of Chicago's right inside library to look up some letters that Japa wrote to Strauss, that he didn't keep copies of it. I was there, I pulled out some of the other boxes and there's some interesting letters from Bloom and Bernadette, someone has really got to do a book of Strauss's correspondence. I mean, there's been, there's one I think the Loweth and Quiré and Caujav and some others, but there's a lot of letters that are just fascinating.

I looked at a few of them. Yeah, you're right, Alex. I mean, some of the things that Bloom was writing from Paris show that Japa was not imagining kind of a change in the orientation. So when you were a student of Japa's, in class did he talk, I mean, these are like guys, well, but one of you should go into government, the other should clerk for Clarence Thomas.

I mean, how did he, did he talk about a school? I know that you said that this was a decided project, but how did he discuss it? And did he use the term East Coast Strauss? Or was this something that when he was in the classroom, he was just a peer teacher in those kinds of debates.

He left, he left undertake personally kind of in the pages of Claremont Review books elsewhere. Yeah, so just one clarification. I was a student of Japa's in the sense that he was alive and around and very active, but he was already formally retired. So I never had him in an actual registered course in a classroom, but I was working at the Claremont Institute and I was at the graduate school in Japa maintained in office first in the basement of the library and then at the Claremont Institute when they kicked him out.

And he would give him prompt lectures and he would come around and read you his latest letter. And so he was very much there and active teaching, but I never actually took formal course from him in the classroom. But I can say that when I knew him, he was already in his 70s by then. He was aware of these distinctions.

I mean, by that time already, when I knew him this was in the 90s, his West distinction was already pretty well established. I don't know to what degree, I think he was more restrained in the classroom with registered students than he was after he was. I think when he retired, he was a little bit more open about all of this and about his political project. I think talking to many, many of his students who had him in class, he really tried to stick to a text and uphold his responsibility to be a teacher and not classifies too much about his personal feuds and whatnot in the classroom.

This is sort of a, to go back to the discussion of East and West on the relationship between philosophy and the city. Strauss has, I think, is very revealing syllogism, right? Philosophy is to attempt to replace opinion with knowledge, but opinion is the element of the city. Therefore, there's this tension necessarily so first and right.

And this obviously is a couple of things to point out what is the attempt, it doesn't mean you actually get there, right? So that might be against this idea that you're completely alienated completely out of the book. But it is definitely, is the teddicking going off. And one question I've always had is that it's such a core text, certainly with East Coast d'Ossins is the republic, right?

Now I was trying to think, and this might just reveal my own ignorance, so my apologies. But is there like a West Coast reading of the republic or is there a sort of, because you have, they had a strong sort of, you're either going out of the cave or you're going back in. And one is really philosophy. One is you're kind of compelled to do it because I don't know, glaukon agrees that he has to do it.

I mean, it's pretty bad argument that's presented there. But what are there some of the views on the republic or around this passenger? Or how do West Coast d'Ossins tend to talk about this sort of up and down sort of motion? Ascented to you.

Yeah, I don't think there's a radically different reading of the republic. I mean, again, Japa did not deny that there was a difference, that the philosopher is in tension with the city. Here, I'll just, I'll come at this sort of a different way. And I'll say that despite his reputation for being kind of a flag-waving moralist, in one way, I think Japa was more socratic than East Coast d'Ossins, who thought that they were more socratic.

In this sense, that he really was much more heterodox. He really did challenge the conventional opinions of the regime, right? So what are the conventional opinions of the regime of our ruling class? You know, go to any elite university, and this was certainly true even back in the 70s, where a lot of these disputes happened.

Even back then, it was historicism, it was positivism, it was doctrinal atheism. And Japa, to the degree that he was more realistic, that he was patriotic, that he defended Christianity, that he defended the idea of the Declaration of Independence as the same things that are true, was radically heterodox in a way that many of the East Coast d'Ossins who were just sort of convention-deliberate are actually quite worthodoxed from a socratic point of view. They simply parrot the authoritative opinions of the regime, right? And so I think that's an underappreciated aspect of some of these disputes.

On the republic, yeah, I mean, I'd have to think about that a little bit more, but I don't recall the Japa ever having a radically distinct interpretation of the republic that touched on these differences per se. I mean, just to hear him talk about Plato a little bit. Yeah, again, I mean, he agreed that the fact that the activity is radically separate from the city. But the philosopher is still always a human being, and Strauss himself makes this point, right?

The philosopher as a human being lives in a regime, he confronts the opinions of the regime, he has needs of the body. He requires certain preconditions in order to philosophize, which is why, as I mentioned earlier, in his correspondence with Coget, he says the world homogenous state would be the end of philosopher's. And so the political philosopher has his own self-interest to some degree in maintaining the conditions that make philosophy possible. And so the activity of philosophy has to be distinguished from a philosopher as a human being.

So Glenn, I'm going to move to, we solicited questions on Twitter, and we'll ask some of those, maybe David will read them, I'm not sure. But before we do that, just one quick, like why should someone unfamiliar with Japa pick up this book? What's the key takeaway? What's one or two pitches for why someone should be about Harry Joff and learn about it?

OK, one, so I emphasize this to some audiences that are less theoretical or explicitly oriented to political philosophy than this. But when I talk to other people, especially sort of spirited people, political people, usually on the right, I mean, people who are radically left wing are probably not going to be interested in this book, just have an issue up. But if you want to understand the crisis of the regime, the crisis that the United States is going through, and in a way the whole world is going through, which seems to be very dramatic and becoming more dramatic all the time, if you want to understand where it's coming from, what its intellectual and philosophical roots are, what it really means. And if you want to understand it from a point of view of preserving some aspect of natural right of republicanism and self-government, this is an immensely useful book, because it explains these theoretical, these philosophical issues from someone who was himself patriot, who thought the truth, that the Declaration of Independence announced were actually true, but also understands the whole history of political philosophy going back to the roots of the American regime in ancient Greece and Athens and Jerusalem, and can explain all that in a way that I think is very edifying and politically helpful.

For folks at home, is there any truth that you touched us on this little bit in your book? But he's most famous, most Americans I suppose, isn't he associated with this very famous line of very gold water? He wrote that gold water to each other. Right, so most Americans probably know him even if they don't know him, right?

He's responsible for this very famous line. What is the extremism in the name of, what is it? Extremism in the pursuit, sorry. Extremism and the defense of justice is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. That's what your famous line we all box it. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, he's gonna want to touch us from the grave.

So, just being a Strauss, Strauss mentioned this, mentions this one of his classes in the different wheels, course transcripts that are on the University of Chicago website. And he knew that Joffa had written it, because there's private correspondence between them, where Strauss talks and Joffa about having written that speech. And Strauss himself defends the idea that these aerosols understand the virtue, which Strauss describes as an extreme, as a height, but the virtue as a mean does not mean it middling or low. The mean is a peak, right?

Britchew is a peak of moral excellence. And Strauss explains this in defending Goldwater's lines in class. So, I think what we'll do now is, I'll go to the mailbag and ask some questions. And then what I'd like to do is just learn a bit about you.

We'll ask your intellectual biography and maybe just ask a few lightning questions. So, I can ask one, because we've covered a lot of the, unless you wanted to, Greg, there's one I thought was interesting. The mailbag? Yeah, go for it, go ahead, David.

Okay. So, we've covered a lot of this ground, but somebody writes, let me see who this is, a bowling brook at King Bowling Broke, from the shows, he writes, Jaffa always claimed to use quote, astrousing and hermeneutic. I'm curious if Professor Elmer's finds esoteric exo-teric teachings in Jaffa, where if he only sees the application in Jaffa's reading of others, i.e. Lachistol.

Jaffa did write esotericly, this comes out, and he says so pretty much, it's supposed to lead in the preface to his last great book, New Birth of Freedom, his second Lincoln book, which came out in 2000. And if you read the preface and read the central paragraph of the preface, it's pretty clear that he says he has, he engages in esoteric writing, but I'm not allowed to say any more than that. I'm not allowed to get you in the next thing. So before we, I have my little fun, little lightning-brow questions, but I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you got interested in the study of Little Philosophy, how you got interested in Jaffa, how you decided to write this book, what are your main intellectual interests, who are your main intellectual influences, all that fun stuff.

All right, yeah, so I was a graduate, sorry, I was an undergraduate student at Boston University, 80s study, international relations, my focus was on Soviet studies, and then in 1989 the Soviet Union fell apart, and I thought, well damn, that's not very helpful. And I sort of bounced around a little bit. Those bastards, I just stuck around, just so you had something to do. You might agree.

I'm told millions should have suffered, but I could do my bastards to do it. And so I worked a little while at a place called The Olin Foundation, which supported the Olin Center, at the University of Chicago, which is the same as Place the Bloom, and Nathan Tarkal Grant, to basically sort of carry on some of Strauss's work and study political philosophy. And I went to a couple conferences there, I met Alan Bloom, which was kind of cool. And I got interested, and then also someone gave me a copy of this essay that Jaffa wrote called A Quality as a Conservative Principal, and I thought, well, that's a crazy idea.

And so I thought, well, maybe I could do something a little bit more permanent in study political philosophy, and I heard about this place out in Claremont, and so I came out. And I met Jaffa, and I sort of fell in with the Claremonsters, and was persuaded by it. And then the book came about, because I had been working through the federal government, so I did my doctoral dissertation sort of fizzled out. I was writing on that, I'll think you're in American history called Hollywood Root, who seemed interesting at the time, but for a variety of reasons, probably personally, I never finished the doctoral administration.

And I worked with the federal government for a long time, and I was getting sort of bored with that. And Jaffa's papers had been acquired by Larry Arnichal's Del College, who wanted to take care of them, because Jaffa for many, many years at Claremont, but it was never really on very close terms with the administration. And Larry thought that Hill Del could take care of the papers, in a sort of a better way. And so he acquired them, but no one was really doing anything with them, and they were starting to get digitized, and I wanted to sort of do something else.

So I thought, well, let me take a look at these papers, and write a book on an intellectual biography of Jaffa, and I arranged to do that, and was able to get it done. The year I wrote it, DC was under quarantine, we were shut down for riots, I was trapped in my one bedroom condo, plugging away on some of these things, and managed to get the whole thing done in a year. But that's a little bit of my background. Pretty cool.

All right, now we actually are running a little long, so let's just switch straight to the lightning round. Glenn, who's your favorite philosopher? I guess, I mean, aside from Jop, I'm not really gonna count him as a philosopher per se. I would have said Aristotle for a very long time, but I'm getting very interested in Xenophon lately.

Ooh, come to the dark side, my man. Come to the dark side. Favorite work of philosophy? Wait, wait, wait.

You have to say, Locke is not always against the air. Yeah. Come on, you gotta keep it. You gotta keep it.

You gotta keep it. Favorite work of philosophy. I'll say the politics only because it's in cortex, and it's always relevant. Okay, favorite work of literature?

King Lear, and I wanna write something on King Lear once I have some time. I think there's an aspect of King Lear that no one has ever fully developed. And it's partly, I learn this from Jop is great, I see, I'm a mirror, which is something, which not even Paul Cantor has explicated, which I want to do. Great Paul Cantor.

The great Paul Cantor. Nice to meet you. You don't wanna give us a little preview because you don't want anybody to scoop you out there in the world, is it? I can't say too much, I don't wanna give it away.