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Willmoore Kendall Remembered
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10522 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1986 |
4,327 Words |
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Gregory Wolfe
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The republication of Willmoore Kendall's The Conservative Affirmation after nearly a quarter of a century is testimony that, for all the violent controversy that surrounded the man and his writings, his seminal role in the history of conservatism and of American political thought is now firmly and irrevocably established. That is not to say that his ideas are any less provocative or disturbing: the dogmas of modern liberalism which he subjected to his unique brand of relentless dialectical criticism are still ascendant in the universities, the media, and the political sphere, and his own sharply defined strictures on the nature of "true" conservatism continue to find opponents on the Right. Kendall remains a presence to be reckoned with, a gadfly who cannot be ignored. If his prophetic belief that the innate conservatism of the American people would not tolerate the wholescale reshaping of the nation's constitutional and moral heritage has to some extent been vindicated by the political resurgence of conservatism, the "Liberal Revolution" which he identified has made inroads that will not be abandoned for a long time to come.
Perhaps the most succinct characterization of Willmoore Kendall found expression in the title of a memorial tribute to him in the National Review written not long after his death in 1967: "Difficult, Singular, and Legendary." Prickly, volatile, given to sudden changes of affection and loyalty, Kendall left behind not only personal enemies, but a host of friends who had suddenly discovered that they were no longer in Kendall's graces. William F. Buckley, Jr., a student of his and later an intimate, called Kendall "the most difficult man I have ever known." He was difficult in part because he was singular: Though he gained a European polish at Oxford and on the Continent and became a formidable scholar, his upbringing in the small rural towns of Oklahoma always made him feel uncomfortable with what he called the "Eastern Seaboard Establishment." Kendall was the perpetual outsider. He was legendary both in the sense that he was an outrageous figure who built up a series of myths about himself, and in the very real intensity and dignity of his mind. Kendall liked to say that the American people carried their tradition "in their hips," and there was no question that he considered himself to be the bearer of that tradition among the intellectuals--or the "eggheads," as he called them.
Kendall, by nature, was an outsider, but that very distance from conventional wisdom and social convention made possible his incisive and prophetic achievement. For the prophet, while being "of the people," stands apart, calling his people to return to the traditions and mores they have forsaken. As he made clear in his essay "What is Conservatism?" in the Conservative Affirmation and elsewhere, the order and freedom secured by the Constitution, with its practical procedures and philosophical premises, had become, to use a hackneyed but accurate phrase, the American way of life. The danger of the Liberal Revolution lay in the fact that the average man did not see the sweeping intentions of the social engineers. The "isolated land grabs" of the liberals seemed just that: isolated issues, not the advance guard of an army bent on all-out war. In The Conservative Affirmation, Kendall attempted to sound the alarm.
The threat to America 's inherited order, Kendall believed, stemmed from liberalism's commitment to the notion of the "Open Society." First formulated by John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century and revived by the modern empiricist philosopher Karl Popper, the open society theory
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