de alvarez on kendall-carey

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mark of Former Prime Minister HaroldMacmillan that if people want to find pur-pose in their lives they should go to theirbishops rather than to the Macmillans ofthis world. One also recalls the sardoniccomment of Norman Podhoretz in Commentary. The problem, he said, is that

when they do go to their bishops nowa-days, they are sent right back to theMacmillans with the bishops leading theway.Reviewed by HAVENGow

The TwoTraditionsThe Basic Symbols of the American

Political Tradition, by WillmooreKendall and George W. Carey, BatonRouge: Loui si ana State University Press.163 pp. $6.00.

THISBOOK has as its basis five lectureswhich Willmoore Kendall prepared for asummer institute held at Vanderbilt Uni-versity in 1964. Kendall attempted to estab-lish in these lectures (a) that the livedAmerican tradition, the tradition that thepeople feel in their hips (to use oneof hisfavorite phrases), was fundamentally dif-ferent from, indeed, was diametrically op-posed to the tradition that has been ac-cepted by the majority of academicians,publicists, schoolteachers, etc., as the Amer-ican tradition; and (b) that the structureof this lived tradition is at one certainlywith that of Jerusalem but also with thatof Athens and therefore opposed in a fun-damental way to the modem tradition asestablished by Machiavelli and Hobbes,Descartes and Locke. He attempts to sub-stantiate his arguments through a close

reading of key political documents of theAmerican people, from the Mayflower Com-pact to the Bill of Rights, using tools ofanalysis borrowed from Eric Voegelin andadapted to new purposes.Keridall did not live to complete the ar-gument he had begun in the lectures atVanderbilt. George Carey, his friend andcolleague, has, however, continued and ex-panded the argument using Kendalls notes,lectures and other writings as a basis. Hehas doneso faithful a job that one can safe-ly say that the entire work is basically Ken-dalls in thought and style.According to Kendall, the accepted inter-

pretation of the American political tradi-tion is a heresy established by AbrahamLincoln. Lincoln, Kendall declares, seizedupon one phrase in the Declaration of In-dependence-all men are created equal-and, without considering either the his-torical or rhetorical contexts of the phrase,erected it into an ideology that has eversince obscured the tradition that the peoplein fact continue to hold. Equality, says Ken-dall, is emphatically not the proposition towhich this republic is dedicated.We must, says Kendall, either begin atthe very beginning, the Mayflower Com-pact, or begin when the tradition is fullyarticulated with the Philadelphia Constitu-tion. And, as Kendall points out, neither inthe Mayflower Compact nor in the Constitu-tion, nor in the most famous of interpreta-tions of the Constitution, The Federalist,is equality declared to be an end of thepolitical order.Instead of equality, the argument con-tinues, we find that the key documents ofthe tradition seek to establish proceduresthrough which the deliberate sense of thecommunity is articulated. The nation, wemay say, was dedicated to these proceduresin 1789 and we, as apeople, were dedicatedto deliberation 169 years before that date.It took us that long to work out the properprocedures that made deliberation by thepeople possible.We must turn to The Federalist, Kendalldeclares, to understand fully these proce-

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dures. In brief, the procedures establish ameans of fragmenting and delaying theformation of factious majorities. By forcingdelay, they make for a politics based uponconsensus. But, as Kendall and Carey seeclearly, deliberation to consensus does notmake sense unless it is assumed that theconsensus the people reach will be just andgood. According to them, therefore, andthis we may say is the primary principlethat forms their understanding of Americanpolitical tradition, The Federalist must pre-sume that the people are virtuous and thatdelay and compromise and deliberationpermit this virtue to emerge.

The most controversial point that Ken-dall and Carey raise is surely their claimthat nowhere in the key documents of theAmerican political tradition, including theDeclaration of Independence, is equalitya central symbol. All the more astonish-ing, then, in the light of their claim, is thefact that the authors do say that liberty isa principle to which the republic is dedi-cated. Now those who possess liberty must,in the decisive respect, be considered equal.Whatever distinctions are made in societybetween men, if they possess liberty thenin the only respect that counts politically,the right to give or withhold their consent,they are equal.It is strange, moreover, that the authorsshould attribute what is an anti-Federalistunderstanding of democracy to The Feder-alist. For it was the anti-Federalists whoemphasized the need for the formation ofa virtuous people and who, like Kendall, ar-gued for a politics of consensus. It is JohnTaylor of Caroline who speaks of the pri-macy of moral principles in a political or-der, and it is John C. Calhoun who is thegreatest theoretician of consensus politics.The authors do not take sufficiently intoaccount passages in The F ederalist thatcontradict their major thesis. In F ederalistNo. 10, for example, Madison tells us thatmorality and religion are most inefficaciousprecisely when their influence s most needed.For this reason, one finds almost nothing inThe Federalist, as Kendall himself admits,

that isconcerned with the preservation and,one may add, the formation of the man-ners and morals of the people (pp. 58-59).The F ederalist No. 22 raises questionsalso as to how far the politics of consensuscan be said to be advocated by Publius. In-deed, according to Hamilton, the notion ofunanimity in public bodies only servesto embarrass the administration and to de-stroy the energy of government. I t is better,Hamilton states, for a respectable majorityto be able to act and to act quickly than fortedious delays;continual negotiations andintrigue;contemptible compromises of thepublic good to occur. The crucial pointthat must be understood is that Hamiltonis here speaking of decisions that must bemade by the administration in times ofcrises. Now crises occur not only in suchemergencies as that of external attack, but,and perhaps more importantly, when thepeople are divided in their counsels (onethinks of the period before the Civil War).It is precisely in such crises, according toKendall and Carey (and, one may add, ac-cording to Calhoun) that delay, negotiationand compromise are necessary.Many more questions could be raised re-garding the Kendall-Carey interpretation ofThe F ederalist. But it isperhaps enough tosay that little or no confrontation with thealternative interpretations not only of TheF ederalist but also of the other documentsis attempted. I t was not possible of coursefor Kendall to do so in the brief scope ofthe five lectures he presented at Vanderbilt;and, moreover, what is proper to a bookmay not be proper to an informal lectureseries where one tentatively works out onesunderstanding.The contribution Kendall made, princi-pally as a teacher, but also as a polemicistand a scholar, was to rescue and revivewhat may be called the older tradition ofAmerican republicanism. That older tradi-tion came to be known as anti-Federalism.American history may, in a way, be under-stood as a continuous dialectical argumentbetween the new teaching of The Federal-ist and the more traditional teaching of

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such men as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jef-ferson, John C. Calhoun and, more recent-ly, the authorsof I l l TakeMy Stand.The difference between the two viewsmay be simply illustrated. When Publiusspeaks of the kind of men that will governthe republic he has constructed, he speaksof them as speculative men, men freefrom local prejudices who concern them-selves with the general and remote interestsof the nation and not the homogeneous andimmediate interests of the localities (F eder-dist Nos. 17, 35 and 36). When the anti-Federalists speak of the kind of men thatthey wish to form, they speak of local in-fluences-of the ties to the land and to thesmall communities that form the characterof their citizens (Cf., Query XIX of theNotes on theState of Virgzhia).

Kendall, in sum, continues the debatethat began at the Founding and he remindsus, in his own strange and contradictoryway, that there are two American politicaltraditions-two traditions that finally testedeach other in civil war.

Reviewed by LEOPAUL . DE ALVAREZ

de alvarez on kendall-carey

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