American conservatism is a surprisingly broad church, though not, as Alan Brinkley once suggested, mostly a haven for disgruntled or cautious liberals. One particularly visible segment of that congregation has been shaped by the work of the German-Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and that of his followers, the Straussians, who are sometime seen as the theoreticians of contemporary conservatism, particularly of neoconservatism.Footnote ¹ Until very recently few would have contested the conservative credentials of Strauss or the Straussians, who bunch predominantly toward the right end of the political spectrum. Yet in response to hostile claims that Strauss was the philosophical father of neoconservatism and ultimately of the War on Terror and American engagement in Iraq, some historians of political thought favorably disposed to Strauss have begun to stress the broadly moderate, centrist nature of his political views and have even linked him with Cold War liberals such as Raymond Aron, Lionel Trilling and Isaiah Berlin.Footnote ²

Strauss himself rarely commented directly on American politics or culture in his work; in this he offers a particularly striking contrast with his fellow émigrés such as Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. Yet thirty-five years after Strauss's death, many of his followers tend to do nothing but pay attention to American history, culture and politics, to the point that Mark Lilla has suggested that Strauss's reputation as a thinker needs to be rescued from his followers’ tendency to write almost exclusively about American matters and to enlist Strauss into the service of a political conservatism of a highly nationalistic sort.Footnote ³

How Strauss was so successful in attracting a devoted band of intellectual disciples who passed on his legacy to their students is not entirely clear. A historical explanation would begin with Leo Strauss's move from the New School of Social Research in New York to the University of Chicago in 1949. There he and a cadre of talented graduate students and young academics staked out a position opposing the dominant positivist and behaviorist tendencies in American political-science departments. By the late 1960s the term “Straussian” was being used in academic circles. Whether one uses the term “school” or “sect” or even “cult,” the Straussians tend share Strauss's commitment to what he quaintly called the study of “old books,” especially Greek philosophy (particularly Plato and Aristotle), to which they attributed a quasi-sacred character. As taught by Strauss, these thinkers not only were important as founders of Western thought, they were responsible for the “recovery of permanent problems.”Footnote ⁴ Put another way, they raised the ultimate questions about the human condition—what is the nature of human nature and, by extension, what is the ideal society, within which the good life, especially the search for truth and wisdom, could be pursued? According to Strauss, the source of these truths was nature—in the classical Greek, not the modern natural-scientific sense of the term—and the body of ideas derived from reflection upon that concept of nature he called “classical natural right thinking.” Even the most “modern” of Straussians tend to assume some sort of vague natural law or right structure which sets the standard for judging existing political institutions and ideas.

Underlying Strauss's commitment to classical natural right thinking was his assumption that the ancients were superior to the moderns. Thus there has been a tendency for his followers, following their mentor, to consider the history of Western thought as one of decline. What Strauss named the “three waves of modernity,” beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, continuing through Locke and Rousseau, and culminating with Nietzsche, Weber and Heidegger, had led, he claimed, to the philosophical and spiritual dead end of modern Western thought. The return to classical thought was to be a spiritual antidote to the cultural catastrophes of the twentieth century,Footnote ⁵ which saw European thought and culture dominated by modern scientific-instrumental reason and its spin-offs in the social and human sciences—relativism, the fact/value distinction, and, above all, historicism, the view that all philosophical truths are in fact historically determined. Historicism especially stood at the center of Strauss's explanation for the cultural and historical catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Thus, equipped with canonical texts and a set of normative concerns, a narrative of the history of Western political thought, and a method of interpretation which stressed close reading and insisted on the obligation to understand a thinker in the terms he understands himself, the Straussians built up centers of like-minded colleagues at Chicago, Cornell, Toronto, Claremont and St. John's (in Annapolis, Maryland) among other places. There is a journal, Interpretation, which offers scholarly articles of a broadly Straussian orientation, and over time it has become common to speak of various geographically designated schools of Straussians.Footnote ⁶ But unlike what might be called “conservatives of tradition,” the heritage of classical natural right thinking has given Straussian conservatives who studied American political thought and culture a unique perspective on the contradiction between American ideals (and the idea of America) and slavery and race in the United States. This contrasts with what can only be called the general indifference until fairly recently of most American conservative intellectuals to such issues.Footnote ⁷

In what follows I want briefly to explore Leo Strauss's rather ambivalent attitude toward America and the way his followers have divided over the nature of the Lockean underpinnings of the American “regime.” With that established, I will turn to an analysis of various accounts by Straussians of how the political culture of the new nation dealt with slavery and race in the years leading to the Civil War and then with race and racism in the period after the Civil War. Overall I will make the point that the Straussian treatment of slavery and race in American history is one of the main underpinnings of the contemporary conservative vision of an America in which color should count for nothing in America's institutional or constitutional life.

AMERICA: “LAST BEST HOPE” OR “LOW BUT SOLID GROUND”?

Leo Strauss began his big book Natural Right and History (1953) by starkly contrasting the commitment to timeless principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence and the tendency of most modern American and European intellectuals to historicize (and relativize) such principles. The United States seemed a beacon of hope in the dark years of the Cold War. Alone among modern nations, America's political tradition offered the moral and philosophical vantage point from which to criticize “positive law.” In an argument that sounded not unlike the Frankfurt School's evocation of “negative thinking,” Strauss noted, “If there is no standard higher than the ideal of our society, we are utterly unable take a critical distance from that ideal”; nor can we find ways to “distinguish between genuine needs and fancied needs . . . if we do not possess knowledge of natural right.”Footnote ⁸ Yet after this rousing appeal to the foundations informing the American republic, Strauss scarcely mentioned the United States in the rest of the book or in the rest of his work, except when alluding to the weaknesses of liberal democracy and mass democratic society. Strauss had learned this skepticism about liberal democracy in Weimar Germany, but most of the time his criticism of liberal democracy was meant to apply to America. What he disliked about liberal democracy in general was its naive belief that all issues could be compromised, its failure to defend itself or the German Jews in the Weimar period, and, more theoretically, its emphasis upon the protection of private interests and its rejection of the primacy of the political.Footnote ⁹

Nor was all of this the result of developments in modern political and intellectual history. Strauss never overcame a certain personal as well as intellectual ambivalence about the United States and may have preferred to remain in Britain, where he spent four years in the mid-1930s after leaving Germany for a Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored year in Paris. In the event, permanent university employment in Britain was not forthcoming and he received an offer from Columbia University to join its faculty in 1938. Significantly, Strauss referred to the ruling class in his ideal political order as “the gentlemen.” Indeed, what “German nihilism” was revolting against, he contended in an essay of 1941, was “civilization,” a form of life that he considered English in origin.Footnote ¹⁰ (Up to now, that admiration has hardly been reciprocated by English political philosophers and intellectual historians.) Still, the stark contrast between Strauss's own lack of extended comment on America and his followers’ obsession with the country is striking.Footnote ¹¹

One intellectual source of Strauss's reluctance to engage directly with American political thought was, I suspect, the subtle difference between his commitment to classical natural right and the modern (liberal) notion of “natural rights.” As already suggested, natural right refers to normative values, accessible to reason, which define the ultimate ends of human society and human nature. As opposed to such substantive concerns, modern natural rights are the entitlements, liberties, powers, and immunities that the individual (or group) possesses in reference to the state and/or other members of society.Footnote ¹¹ It has always seemed strange that Strauss did not refer to natural law rather than natural right, since his notion of natural right seems to resemble much more the “regulative” nature of natural law than the “permissive” tendency of modern rights.Footnote ¹² But far from standing alone against unheeding relativists and naive liberals, Strauss's work was part of a wave of post-1945 natural law thinking that questioned the adequacy of positive law and legal realism (in America) in the face of the totalitarian menace. Journalist–intellectual Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy (1955) was perhaps the best known popularization of this line of thought, a book that contains two references to Strauss's work.Footnote ¹³

To be more explicit, “right” specifies what is best or good, what is “just” in a moral and political sense, while “rights” refer to those entities that demarcate what we may legally do, assert, or have.Footnote ¹⁴ Because we may assert a “right” to do something that is not “right,” Edward Andrews has suggested that “the right to do wrong is the moral core of liberalism” and concludes that “Strauss’ natural right cannot be translated into the language of Lockean natural rights, despite the practice of most of the North American epigones of Strauss.”Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, the classical natural right tradition assumed a basic inequality among human beings, while the natural rights tradition is egalitarian in thrust.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, Strauss's version of classical natural right thinking posits a fixed human nature and a normative purpose to the polity, while in modern natural rights thinking the state is neutral as to ultimate individual and collective ends and nature is regulated by descriptive not normative laws.Footnote ¹⁷ From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that Strauss never really tried to marry natural right and natural rights, the Greek tradition and the American dispensation, the classical and the modern. As the quintessential modern nation, America would seem to represent, at least on paper, a falling away from the natural right tradition. If Martin Heidegger indicted modernity for its Seinsvergessenheit (“forgetfulness of Being”) then Strauss can be said to indict it for an analogous Naturvergessenheit (“forgetfulness of Nature”).

Not surprisingly, there was a certain snobbishness about studying American political thought in Straussian circles in the early years of Strauss's tenure at Chicago (1949–67). First-generation Straussians such as Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and Martin Diamond had a hard time convincing their fellow Straussians that the founding texts of the new republic—e.g. the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers—possessed sufficient philosophical weight to justify the close scrutiny that they were taught to bring to bear on canonical texts.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet Strauss was no simple-minded nostalgist, bent on reinstating classical natural right thinking as such. As he wrote in Natural Right and History, “The problem of natural right is today a matter of recollection rather than of actual knowledge,” while he began a later work by asserting that a “return” to pure natural right thinking “seems impossible.”Footnote ¹⁹ Rather, he saw himself as a friend or mentor to American liberal democracy, which was, he contended, built on “low solid ground”Footnote ²⁰ rather than on the elevated plains of the virtuous polity. The awkward metaphorical phrase “low but solid” grew out of his sense that the American regime echoed, however faintly, a classical natural right regime to the degree that it grounded its existence on other than purely historical values. Yet its distinctly “modern” nature in which self-preservation, not virtue, was the prime political value compromised these links with classical ways of thinking about political matters.

Subsequent generations of Straussians entered American political-science departments to teach and write about the American regime. Originally, Strauss and his followers preferred to focus on the nature of political leadership and the requisite character of great leaders rather than speculating about how to construct the best political institutions as such. For instance, designing institutional checks to counteract the selfish tendencies of human nature was for them a modern liberal, not a classical natural right, concern. According to Strauss, modern politics must learn how to find the proper balance between “wisdom” and “consent,” elite leadership and democratic participation, with the balance weighing more toward the latter than the ancients would have thought wise. The ideal outcome under modern conditions is something Straussians refer to as a “mixed regime.”Footnote ²¹ In general, according to Catherine and Michael Zuckert, the Straussian dilemma concerning America and modernity involves reconciling three fundamental Straussian assumptions: “America is modern,” “modernity is bad,” and “America is good.”Footnote ²²

Since Strauss's death and even before, Straussians have written quite a lot about the “founding” concepts of the American republic and have tended to treat the basic texts of the American regime the way their mentor treated the founding texts of classical Greek philosophy—with deep reverence as the source of enduring, though never simple, truths about the nature of politics and of human nature. The crucial dispute in the Straussian narrative of American political thought has concerned the implications of John Locke's thought for the American founding. For Strauss, Locke was a latter-day Hobbes in sheep's clothing, a thinker for whom rights were primarily “about” individual self-preservation and self-interest rather concerned with the virtues demanded of citizens and leaders in the classical natural right tradition. Put another way, Locke's teachings were the “low solid ground” upon which the modern republic was founded.

However, Straussians such as Thomas Pangle have found a strong Lockean commitment to natural law, thus linking American political thought more closely with the classical tradition than Strauss himself had allowed. According to Pangle, Locke's “liberal rationalism” meant that the Framers looked to the “God of Nature rather than to the God of Scriptures.”Footnote ²³ From another direction, in his Natural Rights Republic (1996), Michael Zuckert has radically revised Locke's concept of natural rights upward. According to Zuckert, Lockean rights involve not just protection of self-interest but also duties, reciprocal respect, and even a strong conception of politics as good in itself. Not surprisingly, Straussians are attracted to those aspects of the Framers’ thought that mention the laws of nature, such as Jefferson's evocation in the Declaration of “the laws of nature and Nature's God”,Footnote ²⁴ and other reminders of classical or premodern political philosophy.

Overall, the debate over Locke is one area where there has been a clear break between Strauss and some of his most astute followers. Moreover, as Gordon Wood noted in the late 1980s, Straussians have made a major contribution to the early history of American political and constitutional thought, despite their (very American) tone deafness to the effects of history on political ideas and a refusal to grant the difficulty, even impossibility, of discovering unequivocal original intentions, inside or outside the actual text of the Constitution.Footnote ²⁵ They have, observes Wood, helped others be more aware of the links between the Founders’ ideas and classical thought, they expanded the meaning of republicanism beyond what it was traditionally thought to entail, and they also have made us more sensitive to the contrast between ancient and modern notions of nature and the right/rights distinction.Footnote ²⁶ All that said, the work of the Straussians has also tended to confirm rather than to undermine the elevated status that the Framers enjoy in popular American opinion. As we shall see, to strengthen Locke's conception of rights in the way Zuckert has makes the Framers more democratic than sometimes thought and also sets the stage for the claim that the Framers were (implicitly at least) hostile to institutions such as slavery.

SLAVERY AND RIGHT(S)

How, then, does all this play out in the historically momentous debate over the abolition or future of slavery? In particular, one Straussian, Harry Jaffa (1918–), has devoted much of his long academic career to exploring the importance of natural right/law in American political culture, not just in reference to the Framers but also in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln. A pugnacious political scientist, a scholar of classical political philosophy and of Shakespeare, Jaffa, more than any other Straussian, has made the crisis of the Union and the coming of the Civil War the subject of his lifelong attention. Specifically, he has placed Lincoln's character, intellect, and superior leadership at the heart of that crisis, something which was still relatively unfashionable when Jaffa's first major work, The Crisis of the House Divided, appeared in 1959.

After nearly half a century, it is difficult to recall the time when the centrality of the moral issue of slavery to the Civil War was in doubt. But it was not until the 1960s that the so-called “revisionist” school, which held that the Civil War had been a “needless war” (George Fort Milton's phrase) and a “repressible conflict” caused by a failure of leadership on both sides, was discredited, not to mention the persisting influence of the Beardian interpretation which saw sectional economic conflict as the crucial cause of the war. A further refinement of the revisionist position, proposed by James G. Randall, saw Lincoln rather cynically refusing to compromise with Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas on the issue of slavery in the territories before the War and/or with the South to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. Thus the revisionist position implied that the moral–ideological debate over slavery had been a smokescreen for naked sectional interests and an index of the failure of leadership on both sides.Footnote ²⁷

In Jaffa's view, Lincoln was not a conventional liberal theorist who believed that equality ruled the state of nature and had then been lost as society came into being; equality was rather something “toward which men have a duty to strive.”Footnote ²⁸ Since equality is a destination not an origin, American history acquires a kind of telos. Furthermore, Jaffa forthrightly places Lincoln in the “higher law tradition” which “judges man and nations by permanent standards” and according to which “our respect for others is required by our duty to God.” Jaffa's notion of natural law, in contrast with Leo Strauss's position, has “equality as its leading edge and major precept.”Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, for Jaffa, the rights of others depend upon our prior duty to respect those rights as commanded by higher or natural law graspable by reason. As the Zuckerts sum it up: “Jaffa's (or Lincoln's) Kantian moment” represented a move beyond a (Lockean) concept of rights that implies no concomitant duties to a quasi-Kantian position in which the duty to end slavery is entailed by the individual right to liberty.Footnote ³⁰

Indeed, Charles Kesler, another Straussian, has suggested that by the onset of the Civil War, the United States was no longer simply a (liberal) polity for which it was a matter of majority political preference whether slavery existed or not. Such a majoritarian “political preference” view was the underlying assumption of “popular or squatter sovereignty” advocated by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's great adversary in Illinois. Instead, the United States had become “a regime or political community—in something like the classical sense—dedicated to, and constituted by, an opinion of justice.”Footnote ³¹ Thus Lincoln brought to fruition the essential meaning of equality intended by Jefferson (and Locke as interpreted by Michael Zuckert), and thereby confirmed the Declaration's superior moral force to the Constitution. Indeed, in A New Birth of Freedom (2000), the companion volume to Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa firmly rejected Garry Wills's suggestion that Lincoln went beyond the intentions of the Framers when he (Lincoln) underscored the moral superiority of the Declaration in asserting that slavery violated natural right(s). According to Jaffa, Lincoln was merely “restoring” rather than “transforming” the basic intentions of the Framers concerning slavery.Footnote ³²

This view had already been articulated as the common sense of the situation by Thomas G. West in his Vindicating the Founders (1997). There he suggested that the Founders were certain of the humanity of the slaves and that at the time “hardly anyone claimed that slavery is right in principle.”Footnote ³³ That said, West and other followers of Strauss who present the Framers in the most positive light needed to explain why, nevertheless, they did relatively little to end slavery and, in fact, after the 1830s, southern support for slavery as a positive good increased in strength. The answer is that the Founders were faced with the “brute fact” of slavery and they feared that abolition would lead to race war. Beyond that, there was the vexed question of the status of former slaves in a free society, which, assuming the differing capacities of black and white to attain citizenship, suggested colonization rather than political and legal incorporation. Finally, according to West, most of the political elite assumed that over time slavery would die a natural death. In his discussion, however, West also minimizes the existence of white racial prejudice; instead most whites did not think that former slaves, due to the circumstances they had lived under, had the requisite “character” to become citizens immediately.Footnote ³⁴ The difference in capacity was primarily a product of circumstances, not nature.

Similarly, Jaffa had to explain the gap between Lincoln's clear hostility toward slavery and his reluctance to force the issue politically. In defending Lincoln, Jaffa insists that we distinguish between “the Constitution's compromises and its principles,”Footnote ³⁵ between what is prudent and what is right. More importantly, conflicting principles themselves were clearly at issue, thus making the situation even more difficult. Jaffa explains that Lincoln's self-imposed reluctance derived from a strong commitment to constitutionalism and the rule of law, political–legal principles that Lincoln ranked co-equal with ending slavery. Indeed, in New Birth, Jaffa claims that Lincoln worked out a kind of unified field theory of political right according to which the “wrongness of slavery and the wrongness of arbitrary power are one and the same.”Footnote ³⁶ Both violate natural law which subsumes positive and constitutional law. For this reason, Lincoln opposed both the southern secessionists and the northern abolitionists just because they operated outside of, and against, the Constitution, as given moral force by Jefferson's charter of equality.Footnote ³⁷

In general, Jaffa's work yoked together two apparently contradictory positions. On the one hand, he links American political thought much more closely to classical, specifically Aristotelian, natural right/law thinking than many Straussians, including Leo Strauss, would think plausible. From this perspective, America becomes the inheritor of the classical natural right/law tradition rather than an essentially modern political regime dedicated to the defense of rights as instruments of self-interest and the anti-type of the classical polis.Footnote ³⁸ Yet, on the other hand, Jaffa also emphasizes the deep historical, moral, and philosophical gulf separating fifth-century Greece from America. The latter differs funda-mentally from Greek democracy “in that it is based upon the natural equality of mankind . . . There was no principle in Athenian democracy averse either to slavery or to imperial despotism.”Footnote ³⁹ While nature for Strauss is the source of, and warrant for, human inequality, natural law for Jaffa entails human moral equality. Though he agrees with Strauss that the twin pillars of the Western tradition are reason and revelation, Jaffa also offers a historical explanation for the decline of the polis and the waning power of classical natural right, namely the expansion of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Christianity, two historical factors to which Strauss devotes remarkably little attention.Footnote ⁴⁰

Out of all this, Jaffa made his case for the “world-historical drama” and historical uniqueness of the United States insofar as it was the first example of a political regime opposed in principle to despotism and committed to self-government. For Jaffa, this position was based on a commitment to “the law of nature” which is “identical with the sanction for the right of revolution,” the “equal right to liberty,” and the fact that for “the first time in human history . . . a government was peacefully replaced by its bitterest rivals through a free election” in 1800.Footnote ⁴¹ By extension, the critique of slavery also derived from the principle that no one should be ruled against his or her will—the principle of the “wrongness of arbitrary power”—and thus expressed the same underlying principle of self-government and opposition to despotism. Clearly, Jaffa's understanding of the historical significance of the United States is a far cry from “the low but solid ground” that America represented for Strauss.

There is much else to be said about Jaffa, but in this context I want to make three observations about the approach to history adopted by Strauss and Straussians such as Jaffa. First, Jaffa, like Strauss, is a conservative of principle not tradition. Whereas most types of conservatism see tradition as the source of basic values and principles, for a Straussian such as Jaffa it is a principle—natural right/law—that determines what traditions we should embrace or even create. We find our moral bearings not within but outside of history or any specific historical traditions. But considering his emphasis upon America's uniqueness, Jaffa's view of history hardly matches Strauss's declensionist vision of history. More importantly, he strongly opposes what he called the “historical school” represented by thinkers as diverse as Marx and John C. Calhoun. As early examples of what Strauss was to call historicism, Marxists identified what was right with what was historically successful, while Calhoun and southern defenders of slavery replaced “natural rights” with “historical rights,” and “natural law” was jettisoned for “positive law.” “Is” became “ought” and “fact” became “value”: history became the final judge.Footnote ⁴² In opposition to the so-called historical school, Jaffa resisted identifying existing historical reality with what should be. Yet there are clearly historical moments when “is” and “ought,” human history and natural right/law, do come together for Jaffa and for Strauss. For Strauss it was, we might imagine, classical Athens, while for Jaffa it was the United States in 1776, 1800, and 1865. Indeed, a sense of moral inevitability tends to insinuate itself surreptitiously into the latter's account of American history. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Jaffa (and many other followers of Strauss) the United States is the telos of the history of the West.

Moreover, Jaffa's assumption that the United States is the instantiation of natural right in the modern world and that natural right has a unified meaning across historical periods entails the existence of an “underlying principle” (Richard Primus's term) linking the meaning of rights (and, by extension, freedom and equality) in the Revolutionary era with their meaning in the era of Civil War and Radical Reconstruction. As Primus notes, if we assume that the Founding and Reconstruction are linked, then “emancipation [is] the necessary consequence of Founding ideas about universal rights to human freedom.” That is, Jaffa is right. Yet much historical evidence about the Framers, with Jefferson as a prime example, has made clear the “profoundly multifold” nature of “their attitudes toward slavery.”Footnote ⁴³ It is hard to square the contradictory intentions and mixed motives of the Founders with the “underlying principle” thesis in which “rights” have an “ontological” rather than just a “historical” or contextual meaning.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet for Straussians such as Jaffa, natural law/right(s) clearly have ontological status. They are transhistorical (retaining their meaning across historical periods) and superhistorical (having their origins “outside” of the historical process altogether), but occasionally and intermittently they assume historical form. They are in but not of history, as it were.

Finally, even before the Civil War, Leo Strauss's original claim that rights were (Lockean) instruments for self-preservation failed to capture the shifting meaning of rights in the new republic. Jaffa's “underlying principle” thesis does capture the idea that rights had to do with moral as well as existential concerns. But the historical analysis offered by him, Charles Kesler, and Thomas West slights the active involvement of free African Americans and later slaves in fighting for their own freedom in the Civil War. By the Civil War, rights were part of the telos of self-respect, as though there was a “right to oneself” and that the self was something more than the product of one's own labor. Moreover, it was not just Lincoln who developed a new understanding of the implications of equality, as Jaffa so powerfully develops it. Black and white abolitionists had, by means of petitions and protests, also helped transform the meaning of rights and equality as set down in the DeclarationFootnote ⁴⁵ and there were “higher-law” abolitionists of both races. About that historical development, Jaffa is surprisingly silent. Rather he tends to consider abolitionists as enemies of (the) rule of law since the most radical of them privileged the abolition of slavery over the preservation of the Union. Whatever Locke or Jefferson originally meant by rights, the new content of rights by the 1860s makes the Straussian debates about what Locke and/or Jefferson meant by rights a place to begin, but not to conclude, the discussion about the meaning of rights in the modern world.

TOWARD A CONSERVATIVE POSITION ON RACE

But what is the Straussian “take” on racial equality, an issue that became even more important after slavery's demise? As already mentioned, conservatives from principle possess a more secure basis for objecting to discrimination and racism than conservatives from tradition, since a foundational principle such as classical natural right thinking (or natural law) stands “outside” of history and can be brought to bear on specific historical traditions or institutions. Specifically, there is a Straussian philosophical anthropology, which allows the fundamental issue of human equality to be discussed. If we take Strauss's canonical understanding of the classical tradition as a starting point, we find that “equal rights for all appeared to the classics as most unjust,” since human beings differ in talent and capacity, luck and circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁶ But, for modern Straussians, this assumption of circumstantial inequality does not mean that human beings differ in moral status. We determine who is human and thus of moral worth through our perception of the capacity for “speech and reason,” which derive from “Logos” as “the definitive human characteristic.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Building on this natural-law imperative, contends Jaffa, assumes that, since we are not “gods or beasts,” then we “have no right to treat other human beings as beasts”Footnote ⁴⁸ or as gods. Thus the basic principle underlying any just modern political order is that no one has the right to rule anyone else against their will. Basic moral equality entails basic legal equality.

On the other hand, for most Straussians, it is inevitable that different collectivities, e.g. cultures or groups, have reached different levels of understanding about what is true knowledge and the just society. In the American context, the unjust nature of slavery did not just have to do with the denial of freedom to the slave; that is, that it treated slaves like beasts. Specifically, slavery also stifled the slave's ability to think about and act on freedom; that is, slavery assumed that they were beasts, even when they were not. In that respect, the slave culture would be, cruelly but unavoidably, as Thomas West noted, inferior to the dominant culture in certain important respects. Such a position allows Straussians to distinguish, historically, between the arguments for moral and legal equality, on the one hand, and for political equality, on the other. The former depends on human status per se, while the latter depends (or should depend) on “character,” i.e. those habits, capacities and traditions that create good citizens.Footnote ⁴⁹ But once a group begins to control its own institutions—Jaffa mentions the church as the site where black Americans (and earlier the Puritans) developed the “political capacity for freedom”—one of the prerequisites for freedom is in place. The other prerequisite seems to be some form of tradition, i.e. beliefs, concepts and values that equip people to reflect on their condition and to think through the ways to achieve freedom.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Straussians in general, these are the circumstantial—not biological—conditions for the achievement of political equality as citizens.

But, again, the fact that some cultures have arrived at an understanding of these fundamentals, while others have not, does not invalidate the notion of common human reason or universal natural right. According to Strauss, group differences are not a function of biological or natural (in the modern sense) differences: “Cities do not grow like plants. They are not simply based on comment [sic] descent. They come into being through human actions.”Footnote ⁵¹ Nor should there be a tight link between capacities and rights. As Kenneth Blanchard has expressed it, “the question concerning their measure of intellectual talent is quite irrelevant to the basic question of justice.”Footnote ⁵² Overall, for Straussians, biologically based explanations of achievement reflect the abandonment of classical, teleological reason for a modern, scientific (so-called value-free) reason. Thus the Straussian understanding of human nature, as derived ultimately from classical natural-right teaching, can offer moral leverage on modern America's most persisting dilemma in ways that traditionalist conservatism could not.

Yet the Straussian position has other implications that suggest why it has been so important in shaping the post-1960s conservative understanding of race in America. For instance, the emphasis upon a close relationship between “character” and citizenship can easily lead to the idea that citizenship should be earned rather than belonging by birthright to Americans. Moreover, the distinction between legal, social, and political equality has historically been one of the ways that segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans have been justified; that is, as long as separate facilities are equal then segregation is constitutional and while legal citizenship (civil rights) may be a birthright, political citizenship (political rights) may be subject to certain non-racial strictures. Not surprisingly, Straussians find the basis of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision constitutionally flawed, since it abandoned “original intent” and was instead founded on the doctrine that the Constitution is a “living” document which must be interpreted in light of historical context.Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, most Straussians, like most American conservatives, tend to favor a “color-blind” reading of the Constitution, a point to which I will return later.

In the history of “Straussianism,” the follower/colleague of Strauss who devoted most attention to post-slavery African American politics, thought and culture was Herbert J. Storing (1928–77) of the University of Chicago and later of the University of Virginia. In the last decade and a half of his life he wrote several important articles—though never a whole book—on slavery and race in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In this, Storing was pretty much alone among the Straussians and conservative intellectuals more broadly. In a generally bleak landscape of conservative opinion ranging from indifference to hostility, Storing's work sought to provide a morally and politically adequate Straussian response to America's racial dilemmas.

With Storing's work on race and the politics of race, one of the Straussian self-imposed restrictions becomes more apparent. No Straussian I know of, including Storing or Jaffa, has ever dealt systematically with the psychological effects of slavery or racism on African Americans or with the psychological aspects of white racism. Depth psychology and psychoanalysis were, and are, beyond the pale for Straussians, who write as though Freud had never lived. The distaste for psychological matters follows, I think, from their interest in normative notions of “character” rather than value-free notions of “personality.” In general, to focus on psychology rather than ethics or political philosophy is to succumb to the lead of modern, value-free social science. Moreover, the Straussian injunction to focus on the intentions of the thinker under scrutiny is a textual, not a psychological, injunction. Intentions are discovered through a close reading of texts rather than by psychological analysis of the author based on biographical information. In keeping with their anti-psychological approach, when recent Straussians do take up the topic of racism, they have tended to focus on the intellectual history of racial/racist thinking rather than racist attitudes in specific individuals or racism in a social–psychological sense. Indeed, it is only with palpable reluctance that Storing can bring himself to say, admittedly in the early 1960s, that Jefferson “probably” believed in the “inherent inferiority of the blacks.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Storing's essays on race appeared just when much of the major work on race and slavery was published in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Even so, the paucity of secondary sources informing them is striking. A 1964 essay on Booker T. Washington, which is twenty-nine closely argued pages long, referred to one book published in 1917. It included a citation from Gunnar Myrdal (1944) and one from John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom (1947), along with a few references to W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903) and one quote from Martin Luther King's Stride toward Freedom (1958). Even more startling is Storing's long (twenty-four-page) piece on Frederick Douglass which cites no secondary sources at all. Though the Straussian imperative to understand a figure in his or her own terms is an important beginning point, it can also imply that nothing is to be learned from anyone else. By ignoring historical context and the interpretations of others, Storing could control the context of understanding through selective citation from texts by Washington or Douglass.Footnote ⁵⁵

Not surprisingly, Storing rated the Framers very highly. They knew the impossible situation facing them on the slavery issue and thus minimized references in the Constitution to, and defenses of, the peculiar institution. But his portrait of the Framers lacks detail and nuance, since they are treated as one voice, one mind. Again, by keeping secondary sources to a bare minimum and in effect adopting the standpoint most favorable to them, Storing's voice and theirs seem to coincide right from the beginning. Even (or especially) when he does not exactly share the beliefs of the figure he is analyzing, Storing stresses the obligation to understand rather than to criticize, as for instance when referring to Justice Brown's majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a decision that ruled separate-but-equal constitutional. The decision, he notes, “may not have been necessary or even wise, but it was not unreasonable.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Fair enough, we might say. But it is significant that Storing cites nothing from Frederick Douglass in praise of slave revolts or in celebration of Toussaint L'Ouverture, followed by a similar emollient editorial comment.

Yet, unlike recent Straussians such as Pangle and Zuckert, Storing brought an anti-Locke /Jefferson perspective to his analysis of the Founders’ ideas. Indeed, he suggests that despite the Framers’ efforts to hedge in slavery, it was the “very principle of individual liberty,” drawn from Locke and Jefferson, which left an “uncomfortably large opening toward slavery.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The pursuit of happiness, an individual end in itself, did not explicitly enough exclude enslavement of others to achieve that end, given the centrality of self-interest in the Lockean tradition. And, though the same essay is meant to undermine Chief Justice Roger Taney's claims in the Dred Scott case about the racist intentions of the Founders of the republic, Storing admits that Taney correctly argued that a “racially mixed polity” was hardly what the Framers had in mind.Footnote ⁵⁸ Finally, Storing also echoes and re-enforces the American conservative interpretation of equality by differentiating between recognition of the slaves’ common humanity and support for black citizenship, between emancipation and attempts to establish their social, political and cultural equality.Footnote ⁵⁹ The larger problem is that conservatives (understandably perhaps in the 1860s but less so in the 1960s) did not know how to think about how freed people might attain citizenship or join a free society on equal terms. Thus Storing, who pondered the post-slavery period before and during the revolution in historiography of the 1960s and 1970s, remained captive of the southern-inflected account of post-Reconstruction race relations which were conventional national wisdom by the early 1960s. No wonder Storing was sympathetic to Justice Brown.

Storing also wrote important essays on Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Storing treats them both with considerable sympathy but, not surprisingly, the themes he emphasizes are Douglass's insistence (to the white man) that, first, the former slave should be treated like a man by leaving him alone rather than giving him special favors, and that, second, his fellow blacks should “be” men, by which he does not mean take up arms but rather agitate and, most importantly, develop their character. In this context, Storing uses Douglass to cast doubt on the damaging effects of prejudice on African Americans once beyond childhood. Firmly rejecting Martin Luther King's psychological claim that segregation “scars the soul and degrades the personality,” Storing also cites Booker T. Washington on the subject, specifically that “character not circumstances make the man.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Again there is the Straussian emphasis upon forming moral character rather than designing institutional checks or trying to understand the psychology of survival under slavery and segregation.

However, Storing admitted that the plausibility of Washington's plan for black advancement depended largely on the goodwill of white southerners. If “the Southern white was so intransigent” that he (and she) would not give freed men and women fair treatment, even in the economic arena, then Washington's case for cooperation must be considered a serious misjudgment of the historical possibilities of black Americans. But he adds, “it will be generally agreed that the Negro did not and does not confront such desperate extremity.”Footnote ⁶¹ Of course, the historiography since 1964, when Storing's Washington essay appeared, suggests, even insists, that Washington's plan was doomed from the start. It charts the pervasive racism among southern (and northern) whites, the eventual acquiescence of northern politicians to white southern control over race relations, and white obduracy, including pervasive violence, against the attempts of freed people to organize politically and assume their rightful place as citizens of what might be called the second American republic. Nor was there a significant amount of land confiscation or redistribution of the land of Confederate sympathizers that might have given former slaves an economic stake in southern society and some protection of their political and social autonomy. Thus not only the reluctance of Straussians to take broadly shared white racial prejudice seriously as a historical and political force, but also the basic failure to accept the modern notion of justice that includes an element of economic redistribution, is glaringly obvious in Storing's coverage of the issues.

Two other prominent Straussian themes also figure significantly in Storing's essays. One is the general assumption of the superiority of Western, specifically American, civilization to African civilization. He quotes Booker T. Washington as saying, “we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians,” and adds that for Washington and African Americans generally “slavery was their road to freedom and civilization.” Indeed, through the struggle against slavery, black Americans learned (in Washington's words) “something about the nature of freedom that they could not have learned in Africa.”Footnote ⁶² Of course, no matter how one cushions such observations with qualifications and caveats, they always end by sounding like Africans had a “fortunate fall” into civilization at best and that slavery was a “school” for civilization (which Washington called it). Aside from Harry Jaffa, it is difficult to find any Straussian, including Storing, who actually makes the argument for, as opposed to simply asserting, the self-evident superiority of Western culture.

The other, older concern voiced by some Straussians (rather than mainstream American conservatives) is, as mentioned, with the negative effects of (usually Lockean-derived) individualism. Storing contended that the civil rights movement had also embraced this individualism in its rage for integration, but that what black Americans needed was to “collect” themselves and to develop their “cultural integrity.”Footnote ⁶³ In this way black Americans could fight against American cultural homogeneity and develop a group-communal sense to go with it. Though such a position sounds radical from our vantage point, the call for cultivation of black tradition and development of black pride was a fairly common theme among white racial conservatives in the early 1960s. The implication was that authentic black self-respect best expressed itself through the cultivation of black cultural traditions rather than in African Americans’ forcing their way into white society and allegedly imitating white culture.

Finally, Storing published one essay (“The Case Against Civil Disobedience”) on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, written just before the civil rights leader's assassination in 1968, but in the midst of growing antiwar protest and several summers of civil disorder. Respectful but critical of King, the critique Storing offers there is grounded in several fundamental points, some of which are explicitly Straussian and some of which were common currency at the time. First, Storing believes that civil disobedience as a tactic has outlived its usefulness and hinders the political maturity and effectiveness of the civil rights movement itself.Footnote ⁶⁴ Second, Storing considers civil disobedience itself as “an unsuccessful attempt to combine, on the level of principle, revolution and conventional political action.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Third, he notes the greater consistency (and thus lesser hypocrisy) of Malcolm X in calling for revolution. If the system were “fundamentally sound, although unjust in some very important particulars,” then working within the political system is the most effective way to advance the black cause. But King seemed to want it both ways and thus “this crucial distinction is obscured.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Fourth, the long-range effect of civil disobedience, Storing contends, is to increase disrespect for the law and thus endanger the social and political system.Footnote ⁶⁷ Finally, Storing begins and ends with a most startling objection to civil disobedience. It is, he argued, “the resort—always a theoretically and practically weak resort—of the subject of law, exercised because the subject cannot and will not take up the rights and duties of the citizen.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Such reactions to civil disobedience and related matters were by no means exclusively linked with a Straussian understanding of politics in a liberal democracy. But taken together they make up something like the building blocks of a conservative analysis of the civil rights movement. Storing's sympathies ostensibly lie more with the antiliberal, black nationalist position articulated by Malcolm X, as though Storing might actually support a nationalist revolution rather than a version of King's supposedly wishy-washy liberalism. At the same time, however, Storing emphasizes the quasi-sacred nature of the law, something which is always central in the Straussian approach to political value, as we have seen with Jaffa's Lincoln. Rhetorically, there is a characteristic tendency of Straussians to think in terms of sharply contrasting options, for example of “revolution and conventional political action.”

Yet much of what Storing objected to reflects the strength of the idea of civil disobedience. (About its having outlived its usefulness by the late 1960s, there is less argument.) Of course, civil disobedience falls uneasily among revolution, conventional politics and ordinary lawbreaking. But Storing seriously misjudges the motivation behind civil disobedience and the objective conditions within which it had occurred. He offers no historical examples of “mere” subjects engaging in civil disobedience so that we can evaluate his claim that the civil disobedient acts like a “subject.” What he misses by distinguishing the subject and the citizen is that engaging in organized civil disobedience (rather than individual conscientious objection) is precisely one way that a subject, the passive object of an unjust law, becomes an active citizen. No better example exists of the failure of the Straussian tradition to link active participation with democratic citizenship. It is ironic that Storing's account of citizenship contrasts the civil disobedient with the true citizen's “decent pursuit of self-interest” that is part of “the comprehensive view of the true citizen.”Footnote ⁶⁹ After insisting on the inadequacy of modern rights regimes because of their emphasis upon the politics of individual self-interest rather than virtue, Storing condemns, rather than embraces, the kind of citizen action that ignored conventional self-interest and even involved a risk of life at times.

Finally, Storing's analysis of King and the civil rights movement is as good a place as any to note the near silence of Leo Strauss or his followers on the political impact of religion in American political thought and history. When, for instance, American political thought—and by extension American culture—is criticized for its excessive individualism, the natural rights tradition—but not Protestantism—gets a large measure of blame from Straussians. Similarly, Storing is surprisingly silent, particularly in reference to King and the civil rights movement, on the importance of black Christianity in the southern civil rights movement.Footnote ⁷⁰ As already noted, the story is much the same for Jaffa's treatment of abolitionism and anti-slavery thought. The religious dimension is considerably underplayed, whether in reference to Christian sources for higher law doctrines or to the importance of Christianity for the communal consciousness, i.e. culture, of African Americans in slavery and in freedom.

RACE AND THE STUDY OF AMERICA

Since the 1970s the Straussian concern with race has generally been expressed in two areas: a discussion of the importance of race and race-thinking in nineteenth-century America, with a particular focus on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of race in ante-bellum America, and a historically informed jurisprudence dedicated to the principle of “color blindness” and hostile to race-sensitive public policies. It should come as no surprise that among contemporary Straussians Tocqueville is one of the few heroes of modern thought since he recognized the inevitability of the democratic revolution, yet was also clearly aware of its costs. As the living incarnation of the “mixed regime,” he was guardedly appreciative, rather than ardent, in defense of democracy. For instance, Ralph Lerner's The Thinking Revolutionary (1987) includes two essays on race. One essay explores the Framers’ attitudes toward Native Americans.Footnote ⁷¹ Lerner makes it quite clear that there was, for the Framers, an “inevitability and rightness” about the triumph of white civilization, though they rejected the extreme idea of “extermination.” The two cultures were marked by a deep “incompatibility,”Footnote ⁷² and nearly every white person tended to believe that there was “little or nothing to admire in the Indian world.” But Lerner notes wryly that almost alone among whites an odd couple, Chief Justice John Marshall and writer Henry David Thoreau, “could sense the profound strangeness of white ways.”Footnote ⁷³ With this Lerner at least alludes to the questionable wisdom or morality of the political elite of the new republic.

Generally, when Lerner turns to Tocqueville's view of the racial situation in 1830s America, he sees it as one in which the Indians could never say “yes” to anything about the modern world, particularly the need to work, while enslaved Africans could rarely say “no” to the demands of the masters or to their own desires. It was rather the commercially minded, individualistic Yankee who represented the wave of the future for North America.Footnote ⁷⁴ Overall, Lerner concludes from what he calls the “awful sadness” of Chapter 10, volume 1 of Democracy in America that the abject condition to which modern racial slavery reduced the slave foreshadowed what Tocqueville meant by “the tyranny of the majority.” Such a tyranny, backed by strong government and aimed at controlling the “soul” as well as the “body,” might lead to a modern form of domination more fearsome than slavery itself.Footnote ⁷⁵ Lerner undoubtedly has the camp system of the Nazis and the Gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union in mind here, and the comparison of American slavery with both lurks at the edge of awareness. Modernity, the lesson seems to be, has been a fearsome prospect for some and a horrendous experience for many. Yet there is no automatic antimodern rhetoric brought into play either.

James W. Ceaser's work proposes a Straussian-inflected intellectual history of race-thinking in the nineteenth century which places the dichotomy between Tocqueville and his friend, Arthur de Gobineau, at its center. On one level, Ceaser's Reconstructing America is concerned with the variety of ways America has been seen from Europe, most often as a “symbol” of unwanted modernity (with anti-Enlightenment sentiments thrown in for good measure). This form of anti-Americanism, claims Ceaser, has united European intellectuals in agreement that American culture is “banal. It had no art, no taste, no depth.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Ceaser's book is just as importantly a defense of what he calls “political science.”Footnote ⁷⁷ To show the way that “political science” is useful as a perspective on modernity, Ceaser devotes most of three chapters of Reconstructing America and a long chapter of his more recent Nature and History in American Political Development (2006) to race as an idea primarily in the nineteenth century. His basic point is that no good has followed from the attempt to apply “natural history”/“ethnology,” sociology or historicism to American history, particularly the history of race in America. The first two terms refer to the attempt to understand politics and society in biological terms. In the eighteenth century Jefferson's great mistake was his attempt to combine natural rights (fundamental equality) with natural history (races as different species or at least different in capacities), while the appearance of a racially inflected social Darwinism a century later testified to the persistence of the natural history impulse. Ceaser's objection to the sociological and/or historicist analysis of politics is that even though such approaches avoid biologizing social and political reality, they are deterministic and, also, favor the kind of moral relativism that Straussians in general feel that historicism encourages.Footnote ⁷⁸

Most ominous, according to Ceaser, was Count de Gobineau's effort to combine a biological understanding of race with historical “fatalism.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Both Gobineau and Tocqueville were fascinated by the United States and had considerable influence there, the former especially in the South and the latter in the North. While Ceaser sees Gobineau's work as a classic attempt to naturalize history, Tocqueville stands at the intellectual and moral center of the book as the classical practitioner—and perhaps creator—of political science in Ceaser's quasi-Straussian sense. Though Tocqueville believed that certain racial differences were “real,” he never succumbed to “racialism”; that is, race as a fundamental explanatory principle for society, culture, and history. Indeed, his work posited a common humanity and thus a shared human nature, as opposed to the strong notion of differential humanity adopted by theorists of natural history and ethnology.Footnote ⁸⁰

Ceaser's one foray into the contemporary world sees him analyzing multiculturalism. He concedes that contemporary multiculturalism has rejected “classical racism” based on a “simple biological foundation for culture,”Footnote ⁸¹ but he is bothered by the way multiculturalism plays fast and loose with race as a principle of identity. Most significantly for understanding the Straussians’ tradition of dealing with race, Ceaser's hostility to racial and ethnic particularism contrasts sharply with Storing's embrace of a strong black cultural identity back in the 1960s and early 1970s. What this reflects is the conservative shift since the mid-1970s from a view that encouraged racial particularism to one that now valorizes a color-blind society, culture and political–legal system. At the same time, Ceaser and Lerner have moved beyond the early Straussian tendency to deny or ignore race-thinking and racism among white Americans and to accept their pervasive influence until well into the twentieth century.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

If anything should be clear so far, it is that the issue of how slavery and rights, race and racism have been treated by Straussians is a highly complex and contentious topic about which they disagree among themselves as well as with others. Over more than half a century of thinking on all these topics, there has been an evolution in thinking among Straussians. This raises the question as to whether and/or to what degree the followers of Leo Strauss have abandoned or significantly modified the basic message. Their answer would undoubtedly be that they have maintained their principles but changed the way that they apply them according to new circumstances and new understandings of those principles. In this way, they can maintain their “foundationalist” position without succumbing to historicism and relativism, according to which not just interpretations and policies but also principles change over time and across cultures.

What have been the significant shifts within Straussian thinking that bear on the American political regime and issues of rights, slavery, race, and racism? First would be the correction of Leo Strauss's low estimation of Lockean rights in a more normative and even democratic direction by Thomas Pangle and Michael Zuckert. Second, there is Harry Jaffa's development of a specifically American version of natural right/law that assumes basic human equality—not inequality as Strauss himself contended about classical natural right thinking—and can be used morally to ground an attack on slavery and tyranny of all sorts. Third is the shift since the mid-1970s of the Straussian—and American conservative—defense of the principle of “color blindness” as opposed to earlier support for racial particularism and pride, at least in the case of African Americans.Footnote ⁸² I would suggest that these are significant rather than trivial issues and want to conclude by noting where further thinking is needed.

The first concerns just what the “status” of the foundational principles of Strauss and his followers are. Originally, Strauss posited the importance of what he called “classical natural right thinking,” which was both a claim about a philosophical position entertained by Plato and Aristotle, among others, and a less clear claim about the existence of a timeless standard for evaluating human beings, their nature, and their forms of associational life. Over the years Straussians have referred to this set of foundational principles as “natural right,” “natural rights,” and “natural law.” Most recently James Ceaser has referred “Our Creed . . . an idea of nature, specifically of natural rights, as articulated in documents like the Declaration of Independence,”Footnote ⁸³ a remarkably eclectic description that manages to touch almost all the bases. But the fact remains that from Strauss on down, Straussians have been remarkably elusive, even evasive, about the “ontological” status of such principles. For instance, is Ceaser claiming that the Creed exists in the way religious people believe in the ontological reality of God or other eternal principles, or is the Creed made up of heuristic and transhistorical, but not transcendental, norms that should serve as a measuring rod to evaluate actually existing political institutions and beliefs, past and present? Is the Declaration where we draw the line or is their some metaphysical “back-up” to it? Of course, if they admit the former view, they reveal themselves as historicists, albeit stubborn and principled ones. If they claim the latter, they need to tell us what that foundation might be and how we are to understand it rather than sneering at those who do not automatically express belief in it.

The second area where more attention, both historical and political, is needed is the whole idea of “color blindness.” Harry Jaffa has recently asserted that color-blindness as a Constitutional principle was established by Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) but “has not been resurrected except by the heirs of Leo Strauss.”Footnote ⁸⁴ There are several issues to disagree with in Jaffa's article, one of which is his claim for Straussian exclusivity on this issue. But whatever the merits of that argument—Alexander Kull's The Color-Blind Constitution was published in 1992—there is more to be said on the issue than referring to the doctrine of “original intent” as Jaffa does. Is there really no place for color-sensitive considerations in constitutional judgments or policies that affect public (and private?) institutions? Why color and not gender? Above all, why cannot supporters of race-sensitive policies, including affirmative action, argue (as Jaffa did in defense of Lincoln's refusal to go to war to abolish slavery) that though they are strong supporters of a “color-blind” standard of constitutional interpretation in principle, interim policies and practices may have to follow color-sensitive criteria such as affirmative action to enable us to get to the position where a color-blind society is not a utopian ideal or a normative standard but something approaching a historical reality? Beyond that, it seems to me undeniable that Straussian thinking on slavery and rights, race and racism has been a powerful influence on, as well as drawing much from, post-1960s conservative thought in general, at least that of a non-southern provenance. Whether that body of conservative thought also depends on Straussian principles, as opposed to Straussian preferences, is another matter.