Book Reviews

But what were Kendall's actual posi tions? As one uncovers them in the articles in Willmoor KendaU Contra Mundum, they were mostly derived from an intense preoccupa tion with The Federalist, particu larly the contributions of James Madison. Kendall had his· reserva tions about John Locke because, as he saw it, Locke's thinking (which trusted to the good sense of the British parlia.ment) provided for no substantial defenses against the possible madness of a majority as represented by a single branch of 1972 WILLMOORE KENDALL CONTRA MUNDUM 255 government. It is the triumph of the American system that it has provided for what Kendall calls "the two majorities." The same electorate that selects the Presi dent as the leader of "all the peo ple" also determines the composi~ tion of Congress, which, through its committee system and its con trol of the purse, often acts as a brake on what a Utopian occupant of the White House might want to do.· This is the Madisonian system as bequeathed to us by the Found~ ers, to whom Kendall made the un~ orthodox obeisance of accepting all their goals, the necessity of pro~ viding for the common defense and maintaining a more perfect union as well as the desirability of protecting such individual rights as free speech and freedom of as sembly.

One thing that made Kendall ·"difficult" was his refusal to slide around the great enigmas of our time. How does one reconcile a be lief in justice with a belief in ma jority rule? (After all, an abso lute majoritarian must concede the right of 50.1 per cent of the voting population to send 49.9 including nonvoters - to the gas chambers.) How does one square the use of the Fourteenth Amend~ ment to compel many things that were left to the jurisdiction. of the States, or to the individuals them selves, by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments? (After all, nobody has ever argued that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have been repealed.) Kendall could not settle the great contradictions, but he in~ sisted that they be confronted and argued about. And this made him an uncomfortable fellow among his faculty colleagues in the' univer sity common room, most of whom accepted an unconscious bias for the Declaration of Independence, which stresses equality, and against the Preamble to the Con~ stitution, which says nothing about it. But if Kendall wasn't liked by his fellow professors, his faculty for directing students to the actual words of our basic docu ments made him a great teacher.

In his essay on "The Two Ma jorities" Kendall speaks of the "bias toward Quixotism inherent in our presidential elections" and the "corrective" of "Sancho Pan~ zism" as applied by the off-year and staggered elections for Con gress. He himself was Don Quixote in his hopes that universities could actually provide for real con frontation of issues and Sancho Panza in his willingness to under cut the modern liberal orthodoxy. His bloodiest fights came over his insistence that "equality of oppor~ tunity" is the ignis fatuus, the light of fools, of modern political discourse. To get "equality of op portunity," one would first have to 256 THE FREEMAN April abolish the family, which would be wrong. Secondly, one would have to level off incomes and ac cept some form of socialism. This would not only be morally wrong in Kendall's opinion, but it wouldn't work. Kendall trusted the "second m,a jority," that of Congress, to resist the attempt to legislate "equality of opportunity." He didn't live to see what our judges are doing to confuse our educational scene, but he would, if he were still around, almost certainly make the point that it must hurt everybody, the poor included, if superior minds are to be kept by a leveling proc ess from getting a superior educa tion. If it hadn't been for inequal ity, the poor would never have had the benefits resulting from such modern commonplaces as vaccina, tion, pasteurization or, indeed, the electric light bulb. We all have a stake in letting the uncommon man get all the opportunity that his genes, his family or the pure luck of an unequal draw can give' him.

This doesn't mean that when com pulsorily seized tax money is be ing spent it shouldn't be disbursed in accordance with a sense of equal justice. But it does mean that non governmental agencies, such as the family, the corporation, the foundation and the private school, should be left alone to favor in dividuals and causes as they choose. Out of the variety of in ventions, discoveries and good works that come from letting in dividuals push their unequal fac ulties as far as they can, we get a far better quality of life for everyone than would otherwise be the case. Kendall was always delightfully alive to paradoxes. He multiplied difficulties for himself by his re fusal to allow people - such as my self - to ground their assertion of rights on feelings that we must assume are fairly common to hu' man beings everywhere. John Locke, I take it, based his claim that governments are instituted to protect the individual in his right to life, liberty and property not only on what he took to be histori cal evidence but also' on his own interior feelings. Those feelings happened to be in accord with what is asserted as Revelation ("Thou Shalt Not Steal" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill"). In his own thirst for both divine sanc tions and human delaying agen cies, Willmoore Kendall couldn't admit that Locke was doing the best he could in a pre-Madisonian situation. If Locke had had to corral thirteen separate colonies under one Constitutional roof, he might have done more to eliminate the dangers inherent in a pure maj ori ta:danism as practiced by a single arm of government. t> tt1e Freeman VOL. 22, NO.5. MAY 1972 ANew AgriculturalRevolution George B. Mueller 259 Examining the implications of the recent movement among farmers toward collective bargaining.