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The American Founding as the Best Regime: The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty

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“The American Founding as the Best Regime: The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty”

Harry V. Jaffa | Claremont Institute | 2002 | Essay (primary source)

Summary

The fullest statement of Harry V. Jaffa’s mature political philosophy: the argument that the American Founding represents “the best regime” in the history of Western civilization. The essay ranges from Plato and Aristotle through biblical religion, Roman empire, Reformation, and Enlightenment to arrive at the claim that America’s novel solution — keeping reason and revelation politically uncontested while bonding civil and religious liberty — is both historically unprecedented and philosophically superior to every regime before or since.

Core Argument

The American Founding solved a problem that “had plagued Western civilization for more than a millennium and a half”: how to ground political authority without forcing a political choice between reason (philosophy, Athens) and revelation (biblical religion, Jerusalem). Every previous Western regime had tried to adjudicate between them — the Roman church claimed authority over revelation; Protestant kingdoms tried divine-right kings; Enlightenment rationalism dismissed revelation entirely. All failed.

The American Founding’s solution:

  • The Declaration of Independence grounds political authority in natural rights shared equally by all human beings (“all men are created equal”)
  • The Constitution’s First Amendment places religious questions outside the political process
  • This “bonding of civil and religious liberty” allows reason and revelation to coexist as “open friends and allies on the political level” — because the political order no longer has to arbitrate between them
  • The result: “the first regime in Western civilization” to achieve this, and therefore “in its principles or speech, the best regime”

Jaffa aligns this founding with what he calls the “moral code” shared by both natural reason and biblical revelation — a consensus on virtue and the good life that underpins legitimate self-government.

Key Claims

Against Value Relativism

Jaffa’s deepest polemical target is what he calls “radical modernity” — dogmatic skepticism or “value relativism” as expressed by legal positivists (he names Chief Justice Rehnquist explicitly), social scientists, and philosophers who deny that any rational or divine ground exists for preferring one opinion to another. His argument:

  • Value relativism is not tolerant but self-defeating: if no opinion is rationally better than another, the most powerful opinion wins — which is simply tyranny
  • “Relativism thus leads ultimately but inevitably toward the worst forms of tyranny”
  • National Socialism (“The Triumph of the Will”) and Stalinism are both products of this logic, because both eliminate skepticism in favor of pure will
  • Marx’s dictum — “The point is to change the world” — is the practical expression of the same error: action replaces understanding; the revolutionary is the philosopher

This is the closest Jaffa comes to explaining why he thinks progressivism leads to totalitarianism — a chain of argument that the Claremont Institute and The Claremonters would later adapt into catastrophism about the administrative state and the “woke” left.

Against Rehnquist, Bork, and Scalia

Jaffa explicitly attacks conservative originalists — naming William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia — as self-contradictory. Their error: “To appeal to the conception of ‘original intent’ in interpreting the Constitution while denying the ideas of natural justice which formed the ‘why’ of the Constitution, is to go to the uttermost limit of self-contradiction.”

The founders’ “original intent” was natural justice. To separate the intent from its philosophical ground is to strip the Constitution of the very thing that gave it authority. This makes Jaffa’s Declarationism sharply different from mainstream conservative originalism — and explains the decades-long tension between Jaffa and the Federalist Society’s dominant methodology.

On Liberty and Moral Law

Jaffa argues that liberty without virtue is not a blessing but license: “The liberty which is a blessing must be good for the one who possesses it.” The Framers “never conceived the blessings of liberty in nonmoral terms. They never imagined it to encompass the exhibitionism of lesbians, sodomites, abortionists, drug addicts, and pornographers.” The people’s authority over the Constitution is bounded by “moral law” — “absent the moral law, a people becomes a mob.”

This is a major marker of the social conservatism built into Jaffa’s philosophy. His equality principle is genuinely anti-racist (all men are created equal in natural right), but it is paired with a moralized understanding of liberty that explicitly excludes what he regards as sexual and behavioral vice from the Constitution’s protection. This creates the structural contradiction that the wiki tracks across the Claremonters: Jaffaite universalism about equality coexists with Jaffaite exclusivity about “proper” liberty.

Athens, Jerusalem, and the American Regime

Jaffa argues that Western civilization’s vitality comes from “the mutual influence” (Strauss’s phrase) of Greek rational philosophy and biblical religion — two “irrefutable, irreducible principles” that cannot fully vindicate each other but cannot fully refute each other either. The American Founding’s genius was to allow these two principles to coexist and reinforce each other at the level of moral practice — without either being able to claim political authority over the other.

This is Jaffa’s “best regime” claim: not that America is philosophically perfect, but that its solution to the politics of reason and revelation is the most defensible one in history. He positions this explicitly against both Plato’s philosopher-king ideal (which subordinates politics to philosophy) and biblical theocracy (which subordinates politics to divine law).

Significance for the Wiki

This essay is the fullest primary source for Jaffa’s mature position — the one that generated the “West Coast Straussian” tradition and shaped a generation of Claremonters. Several things it adds to the existing wiki:

  1. Jaffa vs. originalism: The explicit attack on Rehnquist/Bork/Scalia clarifies why Claremont and the Federalist Society were always uncomfortable allies. The Federalist Society’s dominant originalism is precisely what Jaffa calls self-contradictory.

  2. The “best regime” thesis: Jaffa’s mature view that the American Founding is the end of political philosophy — the best achievable regime, not just a contingent historical arrangement — parallels Hegel and Fukuyama (as Merrill notes in The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory). This is different from Strauss’s own view that all regimes have internal flaws that will eventually undo them.

  3. The moral framework’s exclusions: The explicit exclusion of “lesbians, sodomites, abortionists, drug addicts, and pornographers” from the blessings of liberty establishes the social-conservative boundary within Jaffa’s universalist natural-rights framework. His heirs at Claremont have largely dropped the universalism while retaining this moralized exclusion.

  4. Value relativism → totalitarianism chain: This is the philosophical backbone of later Claremont catastrophism. If relativism destroys free government’s confidence in its own truth, then conservatives who fight relativism are fighting for civilization itself — which is the logic behind The Flight 93 Election and The Fight is Now.

Relation to Jaffa’s Other Work

This essay sits at the end of Jaffa’s intellectual development, representing the position he reached by the late 1990s–2000s. It corresponds with:

  • A New Birth of Freedom (2000) — his book-length argument for the Founding as completing natural right
  • His rejection of the view he had held in Crisis of the House Divided (1959) that the Declaration needed Lincoln’s correction — by 2002 he believed the Founding needed no correction at all

Thomas Merrill (see The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory) takes this mature position as a step too far — moving from Jaffa’s brilliant early scholarship (close attention to particular political circumstances) toward grandiose theory that cannot be proven.

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