The aspect of Professor Hartz's book which I find particularly challenging, but with which I cannot wholly agree, is his view that American politics is characterized by an absence of fundamental conflicts. I do agree that American political struggles have been different from those of Europe, and that this difference can be aptly characterized as a consequence of the fact that, in the Tocquevilleian formula, we have arrived at a state of democracy without having had to endure a democratic revolution. Americans have seldom experienced the particular passions engendered by the impact of the idea of equality upon class distinctions derived from a feudal regime. But it seems to me that the conflicts of American politics, while in one sense attenuated by the comparative absence of a feudal inheritance, in another sense have been intensified by this very fact, by reason of the immediacy of the demands of equality. If all Americans did not accept with such thoroughness. the pre-eminent “Lockeian” tenet, there would not be the persistent record of violent anger and frustration attending what each group of Americans regarded as its just inheritance from the operation of that tenet. To take the single most overpowering present-day example: where in the world but America could there be such simultaneous demands for color-blindness and color-consciousness in the regulation of all institutions patronized by law? Yet both the power and the simultaneity of these demands are assertions of the claims of equality: one side insisting that no law is valid which recognizes inequality of rights; the other insisting that none is valid which does not incorporate their uncoerced opinions or consent. Hartz does not examine the genuine difficulties which inhere in the attempt to create a society dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He observes the virtual unanimity with which Americans have been committed to it, and he observes that they have nonetheless gone on quarreling. He concludes wrongly, however, that they have therefore quarreled over phantoms or irrelevancies. The reason for this mistaken judgment is the implicit thesis that quarrels which are genuine and profound are always quarrels in which the idea of equality is in competition with its opposite.

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.

The topic set for this panel is “value consensus” in democracy. I put the expression in inverted commas, not because I am here concerned with the validity of the fact-value distinction but because, even granting the distinction, I find it difficult to see why, in this context, “value” should be added to “consensus.” Democracy is the name we give to a certain form of political community, and every community, by definition, is constituted by the fact that its members hold certain things in common. A political community, I take it, is always constituted by the fact that its members hold certain political things in common. And a democratic political community would, by equal reason, be constituted by the fact that the political things its members hold in common are democratic. The problem of discovering what constitutes a democratic consensus, as it seems to me, is the problem of what things fellow-citizens in a democracy must hold in common, what they may hold in common, and what they may not hold in common, if they are to constitute a democratic political community. I think it would be confusing, at the outset, to speak of “values,” because, even assuming that we know what values are, we cannot assume that values are the principal things to be shared, or that non-values are not equally or more important than values.

The data for political studies are most commonly drawn from history, either in accounts of lives, events and institutions, or in the writings of earlier systematic students. But to probe the meaning and relationships of ultimate ends like justice and truth, no actual happenings are needed; imaginative fiction and drama can supply the food for thought. Why then should we not as reasonably and profitably look for lessons in political wisdom in the works of our greatest poet? In this essay I have sought to find and expound such a lesson in Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear.

According to that profound student of Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, the most difficult task of statesmanship is that of providing, not for the foundation, but for the perpetuation, of political institutions. If the political institutions are the best, to perpetuate them is not only the most difficult, but also the greatest of all the tasks of the statesman.

The core of Oppenheim's attack on what he calls the natural law thesis is the contention that it rests upon an incorrect epistemology:

To subscribe to the natural law thesis is to adhere to the epistemological theory of value-cognitivism. Value-cognitivism claims that there exist intrinsic value-judgments which are cognitively true or false, regardless of the speaker's or listener's intrinsic value-commitments.

In contrast to this view is the epistemological theory of value non-cognitivism, which tells us that

Value-words do not designate objects, and it is misleading to use nouns such as “Justice” and “Goodness.” … A value-expression in an intrinsic value-judgment refers to a relation which holds between an evaluating subject and some object or event or state of affairs which he values intrinsically, whether positively or negatively.

I take the foregoing to mean that, to predicate just or good of a law or of a man does not tell us anything about the law or man, but rather describes an attitude toward the law or man. Justice, as a noun, is misleading, because justice is not a “thing” or a “this”; it is not a substance but an attribute; not a real noun, but an hypostatized adjective, a quality of evaluating subjects, never of the objects of which the subjects themselves always predicate it.