There’s a reason why political science departments include political philosophy, and Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) is a good example of it. His work began with “theory,” then went on to examine how the American system functioned. The Founding and the Constitution held a special interest for Kendall as a way of fully understanding politics in his lifetime. And he certainly didn’t leave political philosophy behind.

Nor did he leave questioning behind—learned, relentless questioning. A sustained opposition to intellectual hypocrisy and complacency was among this remarkable political scientist’s main qualities. It has been aptly noted that Kendall had “no time for sentimentality, woolly thinking, or self-serving ideas.” Going along to get along, suppressing major concerns in the interest of careerism or friendship, were simply foreign to him.

And so, it seems, were intellectual closure and finality. “Perhaps Kendall’s greatest virtue,” one scholar has suggested, “is that he constantly argued with himself; more than once in his mature years, he had the humility to ‘start over,’ changing his intellectual position in response to some challenge to his habits of thought.”

Kendall was also a profoundly political man who aimed to make his fellow American conservatives more effective. He hoped for the conservative movement’s success despite some differences with it, especially on the size and scope of government. Kendall thought seriously about how he might help to clarify leading principles for conservatives—in part because he thought the right’s other leading intellectuals were mostly “false teachers” and a “poor lot.”

Along with his sophisticated learning in political philosophy and his in-depth study of our country’s constitutional traditions, Kendall felt a strong identification with Middle America. He would, I think, have understood both the current crisis in our polarized polity and the right’s current base quite well.

While Kendall’s intellectual life had an indomitable integrity, his life in general, as the historian of American conservatism George Nash has remarked, was one of “restless eccentricity.” Yet despite his combativeness, his drinking problem, and his tendency to spend too much time writing letters and the like (it isn’t hard to imagine him on social media), what Kendall did publish was excellent.

He did not produce a major work of his own, except for his highly original and much-respected doctoral dissertation on Locke. But more directly relevant to American politics were such articles as “The People Versus Socrates Revisited,” “The Two Majorities” (presidential and congressional), “The Social Contract: The Ultimate Issue Between Liberalism and Conservatism,” and “Conservatism and the ‘Open Society.’ ” They all, and others, could have been the basis for entire books. In reading these essays, you sense that the issue has been rigorously analyzed and brought to a fresh conclusion or restatement. Kendall’s prose was elaborately constructed yet unpretentious, clear, often colloquial.

Favorable in his early years toward a radically democratic majoritarianism and in some respects a radical leftist, Kendall after World War II grew increasingly conservative and in particular more committed to the Constitution’s checks and balances, to its implicit requirements for geographically dispersed and durable—not nationwide and short-term—majorities in order to enact major public policy. He also preferred congressional, as against either presidential or judicial, power.

Another major theme was public virtue and citizenship. Rejecting the behavioralism that he feared was already predominant among political scientists in his Yale department and elsewhere, Kendall similarly came to reject the widely held view that the American founders envisioned self-seeking, mutually frustrating clashes between factions or interest groups as the essence of politics. He argued that the Founding was more communitarian, envisioning (imagine!) “a virtuous people” rather than a merely pluralistic and self-interested one.

Also central to Kendall’s work was his belief in something called “public orthodoxy.” As he wrote: “by no means are all questions open questions; some questions involve matters so basic … that the society would, in declaring them open, abolish itself, commit suicide … ” He warned that a nation’s total ideological openness to the extent advocated in, for example, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty would make politics descend “into ever-deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can conduct its affairs by discussion, and so into the abandonment of the discussion process and [thus] the arbitrament of public questions by violence and civil war.”

Willmoore Kendall remains a compelling figure. There is a special timeliness in his personal story (one reason I’m writing a biography of him) and his dynamic thought.

Dr. Frisk is a Resident Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute.