Perhaps no group of scholars has investigated the principles of the American Founding more seriously than the students of Leo Strauss. The bicentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution produced notable Straussian commentaries, including the still-influential essay by Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics: The American Way.” Although those who studied directly under Strauss have, for the most part, retired or passed, we can expect the students of those students to take the lead as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and, in a few years, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Yet Straussians, famously, disagree about the meaning of America. Following Diamond, so-called “East Coast” Straussians contend the founding was “low but solid,” grounded primarily and essentially in preserving life, liberty, and property and nothing more, thus eschewing or at best downplaying the cultivation of virtue and morality. So-called “West Coast” Straussians interpret America more favorably, even claiming that it is the “best regime” of Western civilization, as Harry V. Jaffa argued in these pages. West Coasters maintain that America, properly understood, aims at goodness and nobility. Why so much disagreement? More importantly, who gets America right?
The intellectual stakes are considerable. Ought we to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and its principle of equality, or should we de-emphasize it and substitute an alternative understanding of America? Should we embrace natural rights or minimize what Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon called “rights talk”? Do we return to the founding or imagine a “post-liberal” future?
Though he didn’t call attention to it, Jaffa is actually the intellectual father of both East Coast and West Coast Straussianism. In his chapter on “The Universal Meaning of the Declaration of Independence” in Crisis of the House Divided (1959), Jaffa outlines the basic premises of the East Coast’s “low but solid” interpretation. Thomas Jefferson, Jaffa argues, wrote the Declaration within the “Lockean horizon” of the state of nature, and within the state of nature, there are “no real duties” but only “rules which tell us to avoid doing those things which might impel others to injure us.” Jaffa continues: