This is the final essay in a symposium that reconsiders neglected conservative thinkers. The essays were originally presented at the 2026 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Click the links to read about Robert Nisbet, Wilhelm Roepke, and Frank Meyer.

　　Willmoore Kendall, the precocious “boy wonder” of rural Oklahoma, was the son of a blind Methodist minister, a Rhodes scholar (he put his application together the day before the deadline), an intelligence agent, a tempestuous and captivating debater, an on-again-off-again academic, and the kind of teacher students remember for a lifetime. In a life lived between these roles, Kendall explored the nature of the American self-government and challenged the respectable and the disreputable alike on both the political left and right. In the words of one writer, Kendall’s substantive output “drew attention to questions that still have not been answered. … Who belongs within the political community, where are borders to be drawn and ought they to be enforced, what traditions and are worthy of preservation, deserving of honor?” Yet, if Kendall raised such vital questions, why does this “populist intellectual” remain relatively obscure?

　　The first—and typically journalistic—answer defaults to his biography. Intellectually, in terms of his influences, Kendall was not simply the disciple of one single thinker or the product of any one single school of thought. He counted among his influences Aristotle, Rousseau, and the Mayflower Compact. He became, in middle age, a devoted student of both Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, both of whom reached the apogees of their own careers during his life. Kendall showed an admirable openness—exceedingly rare in tenured academics—to re-evaluate the fundamentals of his own intellectual outlook.

　　Yet that—and his admittedly captivating personal story—sometimes gets him written off as brilliant but unsettled; “quirky and quarrelsome,” as biographer Chris Owen put it. Furthermore, that Kendall’s manner of living affected his intellectual output cannot be denied, but this will not be the focus of this essay. For more on Kendall’s struggles with his vices, and about his colorful personal life, Owen’s book should be a first resort. Still, the personal aspects of Kendall’s life cannot be the entire explanation for his relative obscurity. Many other intellectuals on both the right and the left have had even messier personal lives, and yet they are remembered more prominently.

　　A deeper look into Kendall’s writing reveals that he sought to forcefully distance his own project from Kirk’s—and from traditionalist conservatism more generally.

　　Most basically, the reason Kendall has become somewhat obscure is, I would contend, that conservatives are not quite sure what to do with him. He is challenging—not in the sense that he is hard to read—his writing pops off the page—but in the sense that he is Socratic, an authentically independent mind, and he deviates (unforgivably for activist types) from what might be called the shibboleths of mainstream conservatism.

　　Bursting the “Free Speech” Bubble

　　As part of his defense of what he called the “Great Tradition” of the West, Kendall dared to question the typical case for free speech—an issue, of course, of first-rank importance in his day as much as in ours. Yet Kendall was not satisfied with conservatives who rehearsed John Stuart Mill’s talking points.

　　In On Liberty, Mill declared: “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” To this classic statement of the supreme value of free speech, innumerable people who profess themselves conservatives, as well as “classical liberals,” both in Kendall’s day and in our own, have responded: “Amen!” But this reflexive retreat to “freedom of speech” on the part of conservatives is, Kendall believed, a fatal tactical mistake. Why? Because “society is not a debating club,” he averred in The Conservative Affirmation. Rather, with Burke, he held that society is much more than that:

　　Societies … cherish a whole series of goods—among others, their own self-preservation, the living of the truth they believe themselves to embody already, and the communication of that truth (pretty much intact, moreover) to future generations, their religion, etc. …these are preconditions of the pursuit of truth.

　　The Millian defense of free speech ignores all these other goods. Every people on earth have established outer boundaries of acceptable thought somewhere, because all societies are embodiments of ways of life which embody, as he put it in one essay on Socrates, “the goods they cherish and the beliefs to which they stand committed.”

　　Kendall developed the point further: suppose we could find “a community of truth-seekers” (which society at large never is). Even then, Kendall argued, the way truth is pursued successfully is not by simply bestowing “free speech” to anyone and everyone on any topic on which they wish to opine. A candidate for a PhD, for example, must have multiple qualified reviewers of their dissertation, must speak narrowly to their area of research, and must speak in formalized ways. The goal of all of these “trappings” is not to suppress freedom. It is to help us better pursue the truth, because truth is best pursued, Kendall contended, within the context of a tradition.

　　It must be added, finally, that Kendall was not at all advocating “thought control” as some kind of alternative to Mill’s approach to speech. This, he says, is a false dichotomy. No, Kendall writes, “the real question always is: ‘How open can a society be and still remain open at all?’” Again, lines are always and inevitably drawn in every political community. America enforces such lines, too, even if we often do so informally. We flatter ourselves (falsely) that we are a people committed to unlimited free speech. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out the gap, as early as the 1830s, between our image of ourselves on this matter and the reality of how public debate is often constrained in America. Every society, Kendall argued, holds to some kind of “public orthodoxy.” And any conservatism worthy of its name must affirm pietas: that there are certain things towards which we owe reverence, not criticism.

　　The Ambiguity of Equality

　　Next, we cannot avoid examining Kendall’s differences with fellow conservative luminary Harry V. Jaffa. While acknowledging that Jaffa was “a subtle and seductive teacher of philosophy who … makes great intellectual demands upon his pupils,” Kendall objected, in a famous review, to Jaffa’s book Crisis of the House Divided for its central emphasis on the “Gettysburg Address” as the most pivotal document in American political thought.

　　Kendall took issue with the elevation of “the proposition that all men are created equal” as if that phrase were the very essence of the American political tradition. That phrase should not be taken as equivalent to the problem of self-government, Kendall says, noting that self-government is a larger and more multifaceted challenge that demands considerably more of us than intellectual agreement with a single sentence. As Kendall put it: “the idea of natural right is not so easily reducible to the equality clause, and there are better ways of demonstrating the possibility of self-government.” Kendall was not attempting to exorcise the Declaration of Independence—he ranks it among the most important documents in the American political tradition, and, as he argued elsewhere, the phrase “all men are created equal” is powerful but allusive and must be unpacked. It is true in some senses and not in others—as Jefferson and the other members of the Continental Congress well knew.

　　While granting, in this book review, that Lincoln was a “literary artist,” it becomes clear that Kendall disliked not just misreadings of the phrase but the making of the phrase into a litmus test: the idea that one’s “American-ness” hung on whether “you accept it as the standard which that experience necessarily takes as its point of departure, or you deny the meaning of the entire American experience.” Kendall also famously raised the question: Does making this phrase the litmus test not “launch us” “upon a … future made up of an endless series of Abraham Lincolns, each persuaded that he is superior in wisdom and virtue to the Fathers, each prepared to insist that those who oppose this or that new application of the equality standard are denying the possibility of self-government, each ultimately willing to plunge America into Civil War rather than concede his point”?

　　Whatever else may be said about Kendall, he was not a man who shied away from tough-minded engagements.

　　Regardless of how one reads Lincoln overall (and it is worth pointing out that there are plausible alternative conservative readings of Lincoln that do not rely on Jaffa’s framing—see, for example, his treatment as a “unionist” by Orestes Brownson or Irving Babbitt), has Kendall’s last point (about the effects of a certain cheap way of reading the equality clause) not undeniably come to pass? How many contemporary movements now feel compelled to cast their cause as “the new civil rights” or “the new abolitionism”? Ironically, Kendall said (writing in the 1960s), it is already being forgotten that the original Civil Rights movement “[pinned] its banners to the slogan ‘Freedom,’ not ‘Equality.’” In fact, “the heart of the matter” in the Declaration is not the equality clause but the words “We hold these truths.” Kendall thus looked to the concept of an American political tradition which stretched back to the 1600s, to colonial practices of self-government in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia, rather than solely to the act of declaring independence in 1776. In taking this approach, it is worth noting that Kendall is in good intellectual company with someone like Tocqueville, who spent no time at all in Democracy in America articulating the natural-rights philosophy of the Declaration and many dozens of pages on the Puritan beginnings, which he terms the point of departure.

　　Not a Traditionalist, Either

　　Finally, given what has just been said, one might expect to find real concordance between Kendall and Russell Kirk, who (after all) also attempts to understand America in a “traditional” way that looks to history and political practice and not, for example, to Enlightenment constructs. A deeper look into Kendall’s writing, however, reveals that he sought to forcefully distance his own project from Kirk’s—and from traditionalist conservatism more generally.

　　The very first footnote on page one of The Conservative Affirmation makes this distance apparent. While conceding that “conservatism in America has something in common with ‘conservatism in general,’” Kendall added, “it is by no means the same thing.” He names Russell Kirk explicitly as someone who has fallen into the “booby trap” of conflating Burke’s principles with medieval natural law reasoning, and both with the American situation. Kendall’s approach, in contrast, had “no axe to grind for ‘aristocracy.’” And (in a direct rejoinder to critics who have sometimes misunderstood his sympathies on this score) he says explicitly that his approach will “do no business with Calhoun. Or Babbitt. Or More.”

　　There were more than a few reasons why Kendall found this kind of traditionalist approach not merely inadequate but wrongheaded in the American context. One is the issue of concreteness versus abstraction. Ironically, though Burke’s followers routinely denounce abstraction, they abstract too much when they import his categories, without adjustment, into American debates. “Tradition” in America will need to be American tradition. It is found not in a vague “eternal contract” or in the balance of ancient orders of society but in a series of specific documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist, etc.). Much of our tradition comes in written form and is accessible to reason.

　　A second difficulty is that Kirk’s way of speaking, Kendall says, “lends itself to a sort of ‘anti-power’ mystique.” That is, in its desire to emphasize the ultimate goods of man’s life, it shies away too much from the necessity of political engagement—even combat—and ends up misreading the Constitution, for example, merely as a project to limit ‘power’ rather than as an instrument for self-government.

　　Finally, there is (Kendall thinks) the issue of effectiveness. Too often, Burkean or traditionalist approaches lead to a kind of silliness and unseriousness on the part of the people espousing these ideas. Some are “so out of touch with reality” that the other side finds them downright useful as “opponents.” Others “say such silly things that [they] in fact forward” their antagonists’ cause. Or they understand themselves to be fighting “a rear-guard action,” a fatal concession which consigns them to defeat from the very start.

　　Whatever else may be said about Kendall, he was not a man who shied away from tough-minded engagements. It was his willingness to cross-examine both his opponents and his allies that keeps his legacy vital and unsettled.