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Jaffa vs. Kendall
🕑 Added 2021-05-29 23:00:56 +0000 UTCWhat is the status of "equality" in the American political tradition? What place does it have in the inheritance that conservatives are trying to preserve?
Matt and Sam pick up where they left off in their recent conversation with historian Joshua Tait, this time focusing on Harry Jaffa's devastating review of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey's The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition. In it, Jaffa defends Abraham Lincoln against Kendall and Carey's charge that he "derailed" our political tradition by putting the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and the principle of equality at its center—a move, in their account, that opened the way to Ceasarism, the rights revolution, and more.
Sources and Further Reading:
Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1970; reprint, The Catholic University of American Press, 1995)
Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery Publishing, 1963)
Harry V. Jaffa, "Equality as a Conservative Principle," Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, June 1, 1975
Joshua Tait, "Why Willmoore Kendall and James Burnham are the Prophets of Modern Conservatism," National Interest, April 30, 2021
Matthew Sitman, "Farewell to a Constitutional Conservative," The American Conservative, June 27, 2013
Comments
Chad Bailey
Here is their website: https://thejosias.com/ Matt and Sam mentioned them on their episode on the illiberal right. Seems like they have influenced people like Sohrab Ahmari.
Robert Duncan
Ah gotcha. I haven't heard of that pod, but I can see how that would make a certain kind of sense. I went to a big academic conference about MacIntyre about 10 years ago and I remember somebody there observed "everyone here is either a hardcore Marxist, a hardcore Catholic, or both."
Chad Bailey
Thanks, Robert. The Josias hosts are Catholic integralists. They are not pro-capitalism in most senses.
Robert Duncan
Fun fact: MacIntyre has sort of come back to socialism in his later years, and has embraced the term "revolutionary Aristotelianism" to describe his philosophical standpoint.
Chad Bailey
Great discussion. I listen to the Josias podcast, and another figure they discuss a lot is Alasdair McIntyre and his _After Virtue_. I would love to hear you guys review how that book has influenced the right and the intellectual critique of liberalism and Marxism.
Luke Mayville
The thesis on Lincoln put forward by Kendall and Carey sounds very close to the thesis of Gary Wills in “Lincoln at Gettysburg”—with the difference that Wills embraces the egalitarian role of Lincoln in American history. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wills drew his thesis from Kendall/Carey and then inverted it.
Lou Guberti Ng
The dipthong in Caesarism in the description is in the wrong order
