Conservatism, Rightly Understood

Christopher Owen’s biography of Willmoore Kendall and Glenn Ellmers’s study of Harry Jaffa are timely works about thinkers who sought the leadership of the intellectual Right. Owen traces Kendall’s intellectual development, highlighting his emphasis on deliberative democracy in American politics. Kendall criticized rights that undercut social orthodoxies. Instead of biography, Ellmers makes an extended exegesis of Jaffa’s thought, particularly his increasingly elevated assessment of the Declaration of Independence that justified a conservative substantive counterrevolution. These works show that Jaffa and Kendall thought partly in critical dialogue with one another. But where Owen adds to the scholarly record about Kendall, Ellmers provides little new about Jaffa. Jaffa and Kendall helped construct the intellectual basis of the polarized modern Right: Kendallian illiberal democratic conservatism and Jaffaite radical restorationism. Conservative in a more Burkean sense, Kendall warned of the Caesarist potentials in Jaffa’s thought at the outset of their intellectual engagement.