Philosophy
Charles Kesler, professor at Claremont McKenna College and Senior Fellow at the Institute, describes the organization as follows:
Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. While we respect both thinkers and their schools of thought, we begin instead from America, the American political tradition in all its genius and profundity, and the relation of our tradition to revealed wisdom and to what the elderly Jefferson once called, rather insouciantly, "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." We think conservatism should take its bearings from the founders' statesmanship, our citizens' loyalty to the Declaration and Constitution, and the scenes, both tender and proud, of our national history. This kind of approach clears the air. It concentrates the mind. It engages and informs the ordinary citizen's patriotism. And it introduces a new, sharper view of liberalism as descended not from the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, nor (God forbid) Abraham Lincoln, but from that movement which, a century ago, criticized George Washington's and Lincoln's Constitution as outmoded and, as we'd say today, racist, sexist, and antidemocratic. The Progressives broke with the old Constitution and its postulates, and set out to make a new, living constitution and a new, unlimited state, and the Obama Administration's programs are merely the latest, and worst, installment of that purported evolution.
The institute's guiding text is the Declaration of Independence, and especially its central proposition that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."
Atypical for a U.S. conservative organization, members the Claremont Institute tends to reject the constitutional philosophy of strict constructionism and often publishes material that is critical of conservative strict constructionists such as Robert Bork, William Rehnquist, and Antonin Scalia. This is consistent with the institute's emphasis on the principles of the Declaration of Independence as distinct from the U.S. Constitution.
According to some Institute writers, their legal philosophy is closer to that of Clarence Thomas, who has said the institute has "played a significant role in my own education"; supporters include columnist William Rusher, British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., and Sonny Bono.
Many of the Institute's scholars are students of the teachings of Leo Strauss, including Jaffa, who studied with Strauss. The institute's members has great admiration for the statesmanship of America's founding fathers as well as that of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
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