Like many other followers of Leo Strauss, the late Harry Jaffa, who died last month, demonstrated that an interest in abstract theory is perfectly compatible with a passion for practical politics. Jaffa’s scholarly works are explications of classic texts ancient and modern: Aristotle, Aquinas, the Constitution, the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Yet Jaffa was no Ivory Tower antiquarian, fully immersing himself in the thick of contemporary right-wing politics. He worked as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and penned the lines that definitively capture the American right’s implacable intransigence: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Aside from the Goldwater connection, Jaffa was close to William F. Buckley and many in the National Review circle. In 1999, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hailed Jaffa’s wisdom. Not unexpectedly, Jaffa is being widely eulogized in publications like National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. Yet the panegyrics that Jaffa is receiving suffer from the fact that they take him on his own account, as a theorist of natural law and vindicator of Abraham Lincoln. They give little sense of Jaffa’s true political import.