Soul of Politics

Glenn Ellmers holds a Ph.D. in politics from Claremont Graduate University, where he studied with Harry Jaffa. He is a visiting research fellow with Hillsdale College and a senior fellow with the Claremont Institute. He has served as a speechwriter for two Cabinet secretaries, and has published articles and essays in the Claremont Review of Books, The Review of Metaphysics, Modern Age, Law & Liberty, National Review, and American Greatness.

Surprisingly, this is the first book-length treatment of Harry V. Jaffa’s life and thought. There will be others, but they will all build on The Soul of Politics, which is, next to Jaffa’s own works, now the gateway to the serious study of his thought.—Charles R. Kesler, editor, Claremont Review of Books, Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government Just as Socrates was said to have brought philosophy down out the clouds to bear on the judgments of right and wrong we need to make every day, Harry Jaffa brought Leo Strauss down out of the clouds, for he managed to show how the vast tradition of political philosophy would bear on the gravest crisis of the American regime. Glenn Ellmers finally puts Jaffa himself in the story as a philosopher that Americans should study on into the next generations. And it comes at the time of another grave crisis in our regime.—Hadley Arkes, Edward Ney Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence, Amherst College It is, sadly, no longer possible to receive an education from the late Harry V. Jaffa, who trained dozens of fortunate students over a remarkable half-century career. But this book provides the next best thing. Ellmers’s account makes Jaffa’s wide-ranging oeuvre accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of his work. And read carefully, The Soul of Politics proves to be more than a mere scholarly commentary but is, like Jaffa's own work, a philosophic engagement with the ideas it confronts.—Michael Anton, Lecturer in Politics, Hillsdale College, former National Security Council official Years from now, our children and our children's children will still be celebrating Harry Jaffa’s life work and the liberty that was so preciously purchased with the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of the founders in 1776 at our nation’s birth. … Harry Jaffa reminds us of [the founders’] great achievements in the fight for freedom and enables us to pass on their great legacy to a new generation of Americans.—Justice Clarence Thomas (speech to the Claremont Institute, 1999)