Customer Reviews

Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum

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A wonderful compilation. Kendall is a very intelligent and entertaining writer whose aggressive anti-Liberalism will annoy some. I should be one of the annoyed, but I much prefer Kendall to the partisan hacks and water-carriers who pass for conservative intellectuals today in Conservatism's ascendancy. Part of Kendall's appeal is that he had a sense of proportion and a sense of humor which served him well while doing political battle against the overwhelming Liberalism that he saw all around him.

For me, the two highlights of the book are "John Locke Revisited" and "Thoughts on Machiavelli." In "Revisited" the author discusses Strauss's Locke, Kendall 1941's Locke, Laslett's Locke, and Sabine's Locke. Here is a funny and instructive sentence from "Revisited": "Sabine, of course, would not himself touch a 'value-judgment' with a ten-foot pole; but the reader will not miss the point: Hobbes was the bad guy, Locke the good guy."

"Thoughts" is a review of Leo Strauss's book "Thoughts on Machiavelli." We are guided in the eight-page review to catch sight of true greatness. When a man of Kendall's obvious intelligence and scholarship expresses his awe, we cannot help but become awestruck (even if only by reflection). Here is an excerpt:

Certainly [Strauss] nowhere tells us, in "Thoughts," how the mischief the Machiavellians have done can be undone. But Strauss's silence on this point is perhaps as explicit a statement as the "situation" and the "quality of the times" call for, and what it says is: the mischief can be undone only by a great teacher who feels within himself a strength and a vocation not less than Machiavelli's own, who possesses a store of learning not inferior to Machiavelli's own, who will take the best of the young, of this generation and future generations, and, leading them by the hand without arguing with them, habituate them to the denial of Machiavelli's denials.