Glenn Ellmers outlines the lessons the New Right can learn from Harry Jaffa’s insights on the need for a “ruling principle” in a political society. Ellmers argues that, while the New Right’s tendency to emphasize the concrete grounds of moral-political life is correct, the movement can’t ignore universal principles of justice—what Aquinas and Aristotle called the “form” of a political community.
“What makes Jaffa’s insights particularly relevant today is the way he appreciated and explicated St. Thomas’s teaching as deeply philosophic and political, as well as theological. Perhaps the greatest doctor of the church, Aquinas arguably did more than any other individual to preserve the pre-Christian wisdom of antiquity, especially the writings of Aristotle, and to recover the moral and political insights of the Greeks as relevant and true for the Christian world. Jaffa combined this appreciation for Thomas’s classicism and political prudence with what he learned from Leo Strauss about the unique challenge of “the crisis of the west.”
“Much of the New Right is rediscovering or reviving one of the great insights of both the traditionalists and the so-called paleoconservatives: the importance of the particular and concrete in our moral-political life—an element long derided by homogenizing liberalism. There is a danger, however, in over-emphasizing the concrete.”
“In general, the New Right’s emphasis on grounding political life in the particular “matter” of custom and culture risks neglecting what Aristotle and Aquinas regarded as the indispensable need for “form”—a theoretical or transcendent source of authority, a ruling principle (arche) that justifies and legitimizes the regime.”
“If traditional Americans and old-fashioned patriots are to have any chance of defeating the woke oligarchy and culture —not just politically, but also morally and intellectually— we must be able to meet the Left on the high ground, by offering arguments about human nature, virtue, and the pursuit of happiness that are defensible not merely because they are “ours” but because they are good. We need a non-conventional account of justice.”
Click here to read the full essay in Anchoring Truths.