Harry V. Jaffa has inspired a generation of students in American political thought by defending the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence and of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa is also a defender of Leo Strauss's idea of a “political science of natural right,” which Strauss drew primarily from classical Greek political philosophy. Jaffa's efforts to defend the several strands of the Western natural right tradition led him to develop a grand synthesis of “Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria,” which I argue is a noble but untenable way of upholding the moral order of the West—and a departure from the intentions of Leo Strauss.

With the publication of Harry Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom, it is possible to see the overall trajectory of his thinking and to come to some assessment of it. New Birth redeems a forty-year-old promise for a sequel to Crisis of the House Divided. One problem, however, is that the sequel contradicts many of the claims in Crisis. These differences provide an ingress for reconsidering Jaffa's overall project and, in particular, his relation with his teacher, Leo Strauss.

I am indebted to Professor Kraynak for the generous things he says about my career as teacher and scholar. I have had vague hopes for some such recognition in a distant future, but not in my lifetime. Leo Strauss, who had virtually no recognition in his lifetime except from the circle he created around himself, is having a veritable renaissance, some thirty or more years after his death. I believe that, in the last several years, there may have been more new books about Strauss than about Lincoln (the most written about of all time!).

I am grateful to Michael Zuckert for his kindness in remembering my birthday—something that I am trying hard to forget—but I am still more grateful for the seriousness and competence with which he has subjected my work to analysis and scrutiny.

From the beginning of his career in the First Discourse to its end in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau makes clear that the problem of self-knowledge is a central problem—perhaps the central problem—that his thought seeks to address. This essay studies Rousseau's thought in the light of that problem. I argue that attention to the problem of self-knowledge is essential to understanding the rank order of Rousseau's five major human types—the citizen, natural man, the bourgeois, Emile, and Jean-Jacques. I further argue that self-knowledge remains stubbornly problematic even for Rousseau's most exemplary figures—the solitary walker of the Reveries and Emile. The persistence of the problem of self-knowledge in Rousseau's thought makes it clear that he was more concerned with presenting a comprehensive depiction of human problems than he was with teaching us how to solve them.

This article offers an interpretation of British philosopher William Godwin's theory of property ownership, as outlined in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin's work can be read as presenting an incoherent account of property rights, which, on the one hand, justifies its existence on seemingly utilitarian grounds while, on the other, impugns its legitimacy on egalitarian grounds. But the contradiction apparent in Godwin's position is actually illusory and can in fact be plausibly interpreted as comprising a coherent two-level understanding of political morality, wherein the right to own private property is best comprehended as a “right to do wrong.”

Post-Communist democratization continues to generate high levels of interest and scholarly debate. The dominant rubrics for the study of post-Communist transformation since the early 1990s have been provided by “democratic transition” and “democratic consolidation” theories and concepts which were mainly developed in endeavors to analyze and explain very different experiences in the Western hemisphere during the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, “the end of communist rule was unthinkingly (but almost universally) identified with the phase of democratic transition,” and “transition and consolidation have been the main concepts around which the discussion of democratization has revolved.” The books reviewed here offer stimulating changes of approach and challenge widespread “West-centric” assumptions about democracy and democratization.