Willmoore Kendall: life, ideas and books

Life

Willmoore Kendall was born in Konawa, Oklahoma, in 1909. He taught political science at several universities from about 1939, worked for the federal government during the Second World War, including at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Central Intelligence Group's Latin American branch, and joined the Yale faculty in 1947. He gave up tenure at Yale in 1961.

At Yale he taught William F. Buckley Jr., and he later helped Buckley found National Review. In 1963 he went to the University of Dallas to found its Department of Politics and Economics, where he stayed until he died of a heart attack in 1967.

Ideas

Kendall's doctoral work, published in 1959 as John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule, read Locke as a theorist of majority rule rather than of individual rights against society. From that starting point he argued that American government rests on deliberate, majority-driven decision-making in a representative legislature and that courts and executives should not override it in the name of abstract rights.

He held that any viable society has an orthodoxy, a set of shared fundamental beliefs, and that a society which treats every belief as open to challenge, as in the open-society thinking he attributed to John Stuart Mill, dissolves the consensus that holds it together. He read the Declaration's phrase "all men are created equal" as meaning equality before the law rather than a mandate for social levelling.

Major works

• John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule (1959, from his 1940 dissertation).
• Democracy and the American Party System (1956, with Austin Ranney).
• The Conservative Affirmation (1963).
• The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970, with George W. Carey).
• Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum (1971, edited by Nellie Kendall).

Why conservatives read him

Kendall is often called a forgotten founder of the movement, in part because he wrote essays and reviews rather than one big book. He was nonetheless a force behind the scenes at National Review and a teacher of Buckley and of L. Brent Bozell Jr. His insistence on majority rule and on the right of a community to defend its own way of life remains an important strand of conservative thought, particularly among those who distrust judicial activism.

His views also drew sharp opposition from fellow conservatives. Harry Jaffa attacked his reading of the Declaration and his emphasis on majority rule, and Jaffa's school argued that Kendall's majoritarianism could not defend minority rights against a hostile public. Kendall in turn criticised the natural-rights reading of John Locke that many of his allies favoured. The disagreement continues in modern argument over democracy, courts and consensus, which is why his work is still cited.