Various schools of the Right attempted to accommodate him only to find themselves obliged, eventually, to recognize that he was an inveterate and incorrigible maverick. Conversely, the demands for intellectual consistency with the oldest tradition that Kendall sought to impose upon other conservatives culled out many, if not most, of those with whom he could otherwise have formed common cause. Against the Right-file libertarians, he advanced a classical emphasis on strong government opposed to their ideal of government limited by the rights of the individual. Against free-enterprise enthusiasts, he taught ancient doctrines of the planned moderate economy, and, even after he renounced his early Keynsianism, he could not see that private property should be given the inviolability of moral sanction. Against the pure monarchists, or pure partisans of aristocracy further to the right, Kendall seemed heretically inclined in favor of popular government. He offended the sensibilities of the latest Athenian Academy by acknowledging the authority of Revelation, while his reverence for classical political theory caused Catholic conservatives to entertain doubts about the depth of his piety. His opposition to an egalitarian view of society endeared him to some proponents (notably Southern) of the hierarchical community, while his insistence upon rational criteria of discrimination diminished his potential following in that quarter. One of Kendall's more Aristotelian habits was his tendency of pursuing political arguments to a point where no identifiable partisan could claim the position as his own.
    -John E. Alvis, The Evolution of Willmore Kendall's Political Thought, Willmore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives

As I drove across France, I was well aware of the Kendall legend. He had been a young Rhodes Scholar, a disciple of Leo Strauss, and had early written an important book on John Locke and majority-rule theory. Taken on with tenure in the Government Department at Yale, he had been a powerful influence on some of the best students there, including Bill Buckley. Kendall prepared his lectures with great care, writing them out in full in green ink. But he was institutionally intolerable. Dwight MacDonald described him as Òa wild Yale don, of extreme, eccentric, and very abstract views, who could get a conversation into the shouting stage faster than anyone within memory.Ó

That is at once accurate and impressionistic. KendallÕs views were anything but abstract, and, far from being extreme or eccentric, I believe they explicate the central American political tradition. But that was the sunny side. In the academy, he did pick fights of ferocious temperature. Within days of his arrival at Yale, he had to go to one of those tame affairs where a colleague, this time the chairman of his department, delivers a small paper on something or other. When the professor finished, Kendall immediately tore what he had said to shreds. His style of argument was to force matters back to first principles where he could be devastating. The ivy must have shriveled on the walls of that Yale building.

Before long, he was on evil terms with everyone in his department. He was a good friend and neighbor of the renowned literary critic Cleanth Brooks, but after a while he treated Brooks as an enemy too. Before long, in pure self-defense, Yale was giving Kendall every other year off with pay, so that the other members of his department might calm their nerves. He was given to understand that he would never be promoted to full professor. On one of his leaves, he phoned the President of Yale from Madrid. Drunk, he said something like this: ÒYou sonofabitch, I know you hate my guts. Well, IÕll tell you what IÕm going to do. You can buy back my tenure for $25,000.Ó In the 1950s, that was a lot of money. Yale telegraphed it. He was immediately taken up by Stanford. After all, his publication record was outstanding, and he was a great teacher. He was heading for tenure when a drunken driving escapade soured that university on him. He moved on to the University of Dallas.

Kendall had also been a senior editor of National Review and a brilliant journalist there, but he was no longer on speaking terms with Bill Buckley, having resigned over some slight. It was said that at National Review he was never on speaking terms with more than one editor, and that the identity of this individual constantly changed. There is still a leather couch at National Review, known as ÒThe Willmoore Kendall Memorial Couch,Ó on which he had been surprised after hours in flagrante with a secretary. ÒCouldnÕt he have gone to a hotel?,Ó Buckley wondered. While I was driving to Paris, he had two marriages going through the annulment process in Rome, a first in the history of that ancient church. A difficult man, obviously, but touched by genius.
-The "deliberate sense" of Willmoore Kendall (Jeffrey Hart, March 2002, New Criterion)

Kendall's "essence" may...be stated quite succinctly. To a degree unique among conservatives of his era, he believed in the fundamental virtue, and capacity for self-government. of the American people. And he conceived his mission to be the intelligent defense of the institutions and constitutional morality through which, since 1787, the American people had manifested their impulse toward self-government. Unlike those conservatives who thought of themselves as a forlorn, antimajoritarian remnant in danger of being consigned to the ash heap of history, Kendall fearlessly and confidently insisted that conservatives had not been routed, and need not be routed, if only they could acquire the right mentors.

[...]

[K]endall, if he were here, might point to three accomplishments for which conservatives should remember him. First, he helped to Americanize contemporary conservatism by pointing conservatives back to their own past -- above all, to the founding documents and arrangements of their polity. He did so, moreover, in a manner and idiom that remain fresh and arresting a generation later. Second, he helped to politicize the conservative movement: that is, he taught it to "keep its eye" on Congress and on the health of the American system. (There was more at stake, in other words, than day-to-day public policy questions and economics.) Third, he bequeathed to conservatives a conception of politics as a battleground between a "liberal revolution" and a conservative "resistance." It was a struggle requiring "doctrine" and "strategy." Kendall's military metaphors may seem unsettling, but for him the issues to be decided were profound: the open society (we might say "diversity") versus orthodoxy; philosophical relativism (and all its consequences) versus the truth embodied in the Western tradition; and government by deliberate sense of the people's representatives. acting under God, versus government by plebiscitary passions or manipulative minorities.

Kendall's majoritarianism, throughout all phases of its development, rests on the proposition that a viable and lasting majority-rule system is possible only when the need or desire on the part of individuals to maintain their unity is sufficiently strong; that is, when their bonds to one another are strong enough to overcome whatever disappointments or set backs they may suffer as members of outvoted minorities. In his later writings, he stresses that these bonds also operate to restrain majorities from setting forth and adopting measures that "test" the loyalty of minorities to the system or from pushing measures that would strain relationships and weaken ties between individuals. Genuine communities, in other words, provide the foundations for the kind of majority rule that Kendall had in mind; in such communities, majorities would show forbearance when possible, the citizens would seek unanimity through free and full discussion, but, short of such unanimity, would willingly and in good faith settle for decisions of the greater number.

Harry V. Jaffa's work has focused on the principle of equality as the natural-right foundation for consent of the governed and rule by the majority. Willmoore Kendall's work focused on the problems associated with the misuse of equality, and the effect of that misuse on majority rule , and the consent of the governed. This is a difference of focus, but it is not a difference that includes support for John C. Calhoun or a defense of slavery. Kendall's emphasis on the conditions necessary for decent majority rule was drawn from the author of the Declaration of Independence, who warned in his First Inaugural:

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

The history of slavery in America demonstrated the truth of Jefferson's warning that consent of the governed expressed through majority rule could be problematic. Kendall thought the problematic nature of majority rule was not solved by the Declaration of Independence, but by the Constitution and the constitutional ethos supplied by The Federalist Papers. Jaffa has long echoed Thomas Jefferson's insistence that consent of the governed must be "just or enlightened consent" -- that is, consent which recognizes its legitimacy in the common equality of man. However, for Kendall, just or enlightened consent is easier wished for than obtained, and auxiliary precautions that contribute to deliberation in Congress are required to help in that quest. Government of, by, and for the people, meant for Kendall, looking to the deliberative assembly, the home of the "republican principle," against the claims of plebiscitary, prerogative-based presidency.

There was an orthodox American political tradition, Willmoore thought, and a constant challenge to ÒderailÓ it by plebiscites or newly proclaimed Òrights.Ó The Constitution designed in Philadelphia was a virtually sacred utterance to him, and its basis was established in its very brief preamble, the most important words of which were the first three: We the people. Government by Òwe the peopleÓ has been the American goal, the gift to the world symbolized by the light the Statue of Liberty holds aloft. The preamble next sets forth six general goals of the new government. The term ÒrightsÓ is never mentioned.

Everything that follows, that is, almost the entire Constitution as ratified and amended, constitutes a mechanism for achieving the six goals of the preamble. It is striking that the six goals are syntactically equal. Which of the six goals takes precedence at a given juncture depends on ÒdiscussionÓ by the government set forth in the Constitution. It is a Òdeliberate senseÓ theory of government, ÒsenseÓ emerging through Òdeliberation.Ó

This mechanism of self-government was, as I say, sacred territory to Willmoore. He had been a man of the left until he had gone to Spain as a journalist during the civil war and had seen there a variety of ideologies alien to America, that is, to the Constitution. These included royalism, Communism, fascism, anarchism. His understanding was that the ratified Constitution represented a permanent agreement on the orthodox American form of representative government.

[S]trauss suggested how classical philosophy could aid a thinker who was beginning to be painfully cognizant of the insufficiency of "value-free" political science for understanding modern regimes, or for understanding politics simply. Strauss's Natural Right and History and, later, his Thoughts on Machiavelli, taught Kendall to see the modern political enterprise as a continuing effort to establish a revolutionary view of human nature and its destiny. This effort could be conceived as a concerted revolt by modern political philosophy against the established tradition developed by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas. The revolt aimed to supplement the ancient understanding of man as rational with the view that man is bound by his appetites and, consonant with this lowering of its human estimate, envisioned a reductionist prospect for human community to be realized by the new contract model of the political regime. From his study of Strauss, Kendall must necessarily have seen the need to enlarge the range of his majoritarian theory so as to accommodate Strauss's analysis of all modern theories of consent, whether Lockean and liberal or Hobbesian and absolutist. He must have realized, furthermore, that to establish worthy credentials for democracy, more would be required than an argument which rested upon a prejudice in its favor now universal but quite parochial when considered historically. From Strauss, Kendall could have learned that his majoritarian premises were not only less than self-evident, but, at least from the perspective of an esteemable tradition of great political thinkers, quite evidently false. To meet the objections of premodern anti-democratic theorists, Kendall was obliged to take seriously the entire range of ethical considerations entertained by the Great Tradition.

Having once begun this task of critical self-examination, Kendall followed wherever the argument led until he came to a position that was virtually a renunciation of his early thought. Such a drastic realignment in political fundamentals is a familiar enough phenomenon among younger disciples of Voegelin and Strauss. Their students learn to emulate their masters' respect for Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers of antiquity in general. However, Kendall is, to my knowledge, the outstanding, and perhaps the only, example of a mature thinker established in his profession who undertook a thoroughgoing revision of his point of view as a result of his exposure to the efforts of Strauss and Voegelin to reform the discipline.