The Stakes: Harry Jaffa’s Philosophy
The American Mind
The Claremont Institute
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2022
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this edition of The Stakes, Claremont Senior Fellow Michael Anton, a lecturer in politics and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, talks with Glenn Ellmers, Visiting Research Scholar at Hillsdale College and author of The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America. The two discuss some of the major ideas and principles in Harry Jaffa’s philosophical writing, and how those principles might apply to the modern American crisis. Plus: a defense of some of Jaffa’s more contentious ideas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Michael Anton, your periodic |
| 0:25.1 | podcast here at the Claremont Institute. I am a lecturer and research fellow at |
| 0:31.6 | Hillsdale College's Washington DC campus. You've heard from me before. I have a guest |
| 0:37.0 | who's probably familiar to you also with the Claremont Institute as I am |
| 0:41.6 | but part-time. This is Glenn Ellers and what we want to talk about today is our |
| 0:47.0 | teacher Harry Jaffa. So I knew Jaffa for a long time but day-to-day was about |
| 0:57.2 | three years, 1994 to 1997. Glenn knew him for much longer. Glenn, what, like 1990 |
| 1:03.6 | to 2000 you were in Claremont? 91, yeah until I finally laughed right. He |
| 1:11.3 | had already retired when I knew him but as you know, he was still around at very |
| 1:16.1 | accurate. We can talk about that in a second but also Glenn literally wrote the |
| 1:19.9 | book on Harry Jaffa. The only book just about Jaffa yet published. It's a |
| 1:25.4 | biography but you know I mean the biography of a college professor, what do you say? |
| 1:29.4 | He read books, he taught classes, it's not like he was Winston Churchill |
| 1:32.3 | escaping from South African jails. So it's mostly a biography of Jaffa's books and |
| 1:37.1 | ideas and to do that I will say to the reader or the listener that Glenn, you |
| 1:42.7 | know Jaffa's archives are accessible at Hillsdale College and Glenn dug |
| 1:47.0 | around and read things that people don't normally read. I mean it's one thing to |
| 1:49.8 | read all of Jaffa's books which I have done and many people have done. There's |
| 1:53.2 | another thing to let go and find his papers and his letters and many people have |
| 1:56.8 | not done that and I think you also went a number of times to Chicago and read |
| 2:01.0 | into the Strauss archives which has a number of Jaffa's letters to Strauss. So |
| 2:06.0 | correct. You know we have an authority. We like to affectionately call him the |
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