[A]ll the enduring institutions which human societies have attained have been reached, not of a set design and forethought of some group of statesmen, but of that unbidden and uncoerced consequence of many thoughts and wills in succeeding generations, to which, as it obeys no single guiding hand, one may give the name of ‘drifting.’

The sentiments could be those of an Old Whig such as Burke. In fact, the words belong to the quintessential 19th-century Tory, Lord Salisbury, as quoted in David Steele’s biography.

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I don’t agree, for reasons that the “Firing Line” episode below ought to make clear. But that didn’t stop me from hatching a plan when I worked for the Paul campaign in 2008 to net WFB’s endorsement. He had said some encouraging things about Paul, so I leaned on a friend of mine whom Buckley had begun to cultivate as a protege (he had many) to lobby for his imprimatur. We never went through with it, for the very good reason that WFB was failing fast — this was in mid-February, and Buckley died Feb. 28. If he had recovered, though, we would have put to the test whether his frustrations with conservative movement he had done so much to build would have led him to make a revolutionary endorsement.

It should be noted, though, that at the height of his prestige WFB was reluctant to support insurgent conservative candidates. In 1964, James Burnham had convinced him that Goldwater simply couldn’t win in November, which led Buckley to the brink of throwing National Review‘s support behind Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican primaries. If Goldwater lost in California, Buckley decided, NR would call for him to drop out. Bill Rusher, Bill Rickenbacker, and others were prepared to tender their resignations, though in the event Goldwater pulled through and Buckley relented.

Despite all that, there’s some reason to think WFB was getting more unconventional toward the end. Asked by Corey Robin in 2001 what kind of politics a young 21st-century William F. Buckley would embrace, he replied, “I’d be a socialist. A Mike Harrington socialist. I’d even say a communist.” He was mostly joking, but the remark suggests he was aware of how stale movement conservatism had become.

He was an exemplary man, and he took part in many of the controversies and political battles of his time. He served on the National Council for the Humanities in the 1980s, when the panel was sharply divided between traditionalists and neoconservatives, and he even had a hand in writing the constitution of Michigan while he was at the University of Detroit. The Rock River Times has an obituary here.

Update: There’s a good interview with Stanlis on Burke and Frost here.

There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Read on.

A reader on @TAC thinks I’m too kind to Reagan in the Buckley review. The litany of bad policies and personnel choices under Reagan is lengthy: the federal government grew and the executive branch became more secretive and less accountable; the neoconservatives gained a permanent foothold in the GOP; Reagan’s judicial appointments were often flawed; the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon but became more enmeshed in Third World proxy warfare; the drug war escalated; etc. For the case against Reagan, see Murray Rothbard, as well as Peter Hitchens’s TAC review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

On the other hand, while conservative movement hacks regularly overestimate Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War, his critics continue to underestimate that contribution. A relative of mine who was no admirer of Reagan interacted with Eastern Europeans quite a bit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Poles and Czechs and East Germans certainly did feel a debt to Reagan, even to the point of naming their children after him. He was the first American president in a generation who did not equivocate about the evils of socialism and the Soviet empire. The nations of what had traditionally been Central Europe had seen their sovereignty signed away by Roosevelt and Truman at the Yalta and Potsdam conference. Reagan seemed to repudiate those concessions.

He did so without starting World War III or, what was a greater risk, eliciting a Soviet crackdown. He took fire from the neoconservatives and movement cons for his negotiations with Gorbachev — which were not always as friendly as they are popularly remembered as being — but Reagan successfully de-escalated the Cold War in Europe while giving moral support to the captive nations. That Reagan did both of these things is astonishing: had anyone else been in office, the one should have undermined the other. Think of Gerald Ford asserting in debate with Jimmy Carter, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Republicans could, as Nixon did, “go to China,” but in doing so they appeared to be surrendering the moral high ground. Reagan was firm and flexible in exactly the right proportion, and it was no accident. He genuinely believed that communism was evil — a term that doesn’t carry much weight in realpolitik — and he genuinely believed that people longed to be free and were basically good. The former was a conservative belief, the latter a liberal one. Both proved to be indispensable at the moment when he was president. (I should note, by the way, that Peter Hitchens’s piece in the March 2011 issue of The American Conservative is essential reading, especially for those who think that history had a simple happy ending once the Soviet empire fell — the corruption and post-communist forms of despotism that took root throughout much of the former USSR after 1991 attest to the darker side of history.)

At home as well, Reagan accomplished an historical remoralization — not in the sense of renewing morality, but in restoring morale. That has entailed a mixed legacy: Americans, especially conservatives, began to reaffirm markets over Great Society (if not New Deal) planned and the country became more entrepreneurial. We entered a new era, one in which the dominant political tones would be those of neo-liberal economics. Cutting taxes and growing the economy came to take precedence over creating new government services — at least, rhetorically they did. In practice, Leviathan continue to grow during Reagan’s years and afterward, and new kinds of economic insanity flourished, above all the now pathological Republican belief that economic growth is a freedom-preserving panacea. Reagan was not, in fact, as much of a neo-liberal as his epigones — as Jeff Riggenbach has pointed out, he was actually more of a protectionist than the presidents on either side of him. But even if Reagan’s policies had a Buchananite tinge to them, the worldview that predominated on the right after the Reagan era was one of free-trade agreements and open borders. And beneath this neo-liberal veneer, neo-imperial foreign-policy views proliferated, thanks to the neoconservatives that Reagan brought to government and to the exceptionalist and democratist rhetoric Reagan himself employed. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Reagan also had Buchanan and other traditional conservatives in his administration. The president hardly handed power directly to the neoconservatives.

Reagan’s foreign policy in Europe and toward the USSR was a success of world-historical proportions — again, not because he brought down the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union, but because he encouraged the Europeans who did tear down the wall, and he avoided the grandiose military-strategic blunders of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (as well as Bush, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama). His foreign policy elsewhere was mixed, but again not catastrophic, which is actually saying a lot. At home, his policies were also mixed and he sowed seeds that would bear terrible fruit in the Great Recession. Letting those seeds grow into entangling weeds, though, is something for which Clinton and Bush II deserve more reproach. Reagan was the right man for his time and place; the trouble is that once he had left office his Emersonian optimism was turned into a hard and cynical neo-liberal statism by his successors, both on the right and in the Oval Office.

Conservatism understood as something intimately connected to feudal institutions poses a difficulty for the American Right, in that it’s conventionally thought that America didn’t have a feudal past. (Robert Nisbet challenges that notion in “The Social Impact of the Revolution.”) But a historically grounded American conservatism does not have to locate itself in European history. There are American traditions, and those traditions are worth conserving, even if they aren’t what textbook traditionalists, taking their inspiration from Europe, consider to be authentically conservative. Caleb Stegall makes this point very well in this post on Front Porch Republic. Caleb would perhaps go farther than I would in finding something conservative about Emerson or Thoreau, but there’s no doubting that there’s something characteristically American about them. Certainly Ronald Reagan thought so, as John Patrick Diggins showed.

(An earlier Diggins book, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism, tackles the problem in an interesting way: he contradicts those who say that America doesn’t have strongly Lockean inclinations, but he argues that those leanings were once restrained and refined by Calvinist tradition, which has since slipped away.)

What can you conserve in a New World where men have no past — where there are “keine verfallenen Schlösser / und keine Basalte”? If “feudal” ideas and institutions are really so important elsewhere, won’t America suffer for their absence? On the other hand, as Willmoore Kendall asked, what kind of conservative “takes a dim view of his country’s established institutions, feels something less than at home with its way of life as it actually lives it, [and] finds it difficult to identify himself with the political and moral principles on which it has acted through its history”? These are questions that serious traditionalists should wrestle with. Stegall, as well as Patrick Deneen and others writing at FPR, have addressed a question that needs careful exploration, even — or especially — if it makes neoconservatives and Mr. Peanut traditionalists uncomfortable.

He begins with the attempt, apparent in Machiavelli and carried through by Hobbes, to separate politics from the Church. With Locke, liberalism turns away from pessimism and creates a benign view of man’s nature; man now acts not out of fear of death, but desire for gain and convenience. As an antidote to the danger that Lockean majoritarianism poses to the very rights Locke wanted to protect, Montesquieu (borrowing from Bolingbroke) suggests that the representation of popular sovereignty be divided between two institutions, the legislature and the executive. At this point, civil society and the individual have been separated from politics; they are free to pursue whatever they wish. Rousseau finds that this, however, only reveals an unbearable new problem, a schism within the individual psyche. The individual thinks only of himself in his relations with others, but incessantly compares himself to others in reflecting on his own worth. Society, meanwhile, has become an unguided mass of resentments and jealousies and weighs heavily on the individual.

To overcome this misery, Rousseau proposes the integration of the individual, the state, and society through the General Will; this will bring about a total transformation, a revolution, in human nature and in every institution. Rousseau doesn’t specify much of the content of the General Will or show what this revolutionary transformation will look like, but two points I should underscore are that a.) it’s not necessarily left-wing communitarianism that best exemplifies what Rousseau was trying to achieve, and b.) Rousseau has in practice not emancipated the fictitious General Will but will in general: every alienated individual can now believe that the solution to his personal problems lies in political and cultural revolution along the lines of whatever ideology he believes in.

Rousseau was no liberal but he prepared the way for new kinds of liberalism that would adopt his emphasis on equality and his method of remaking human nature through socio-political revolution. Manent explains that liberalism after Rousseau has reversed Hobbes: the author of Leviathan began with a state of nature in which man could only be delivered from the bloody condition of equality — every man being equally liable to be killed by his fellows — through the creation of the state. But over time, advanced liberals came to dream of the state leading us to a blissful condition of equality, in which the state itself would whither away. For Hobbes, brutal human nature requires the construction of Leviathan; for the liberal after Rousseau, a gentle but all-pervasive state is necessary to refashion human nature. That’s what progress means.

Manent is very good at explaining how the liberal state that emerges after the French Revolution is simultaneously weaker than and stronger than society — weaker in that society is now the ultimate medium of human satisfaction and public opinion (and its manipulation) becomes increasingly influential over the state; stronger in that the state becomes more pervasive and interferes in areas of life never before subject to power. Having first divided religion from state and state from society, liberalism ends up reuniting them on new terms. Public opinion — in suitably interpreted form, of course — becomes the new religion and holds the sword of state.

Post-revolutionary liberals such as Constant and Guizot recognized what dangerous forces Rousseau had unleashed. For Constant, neutralizing the danger meant turning to a liberalism of opposition that kept will divided and skeptical in government and directed the transformational urge toward literature. For Guizot, opposition, criticism, and irony could not be enough; liberals must reassert the independence of the state from the opinion of society. Tocqueville, meanwhile, examined what happens when democracy, an outgrowth of late liberalism, is taken to its furthest expression. He found that while democratic liberalism might be acidic to old forms of community, without a tutelary power to provide for human needs, atomized individuals would be forced to create new kinds of community. Should there be a centralized state to obviate the need to rediscover community, however, atomization could proceed much further — with all the attendant anomie, restlessness, and revolutionary desire that moderate liberals feared.

This synopsis may make Manent’s book sound rather ordinary, but what makes it a tour de force is how elegantly he reveals the connections and undertones in this straightforward narrative. Manent problematizes liberalism effectively, which leads to many interesting questions.

In typing up some notes about the book and Googling around for related items, I returned to a blog post of Patrick Deneen’s from 2007 in which he asks whether classical liberalism, modernity’s “first wave” (as Strauss conceived it), ineluctably leads to the second- and third-waves of modernity (historicism, relativism, nihilism — the point I would stress is that it’s not merely a theoretical -ism that poses the danger here, but real practices and habits of thought. Think of the imperial will unleashed). If Strauss is correct about this inevitable sequence, then liberal conservatives who attempt to preserve classical liberalism — and free institutions such as the U.S. Constitution — are at best wasting their efforts. At worst, they may be supporting the very source of the later “waves” they wish to turn back.

Certainly traditional conservatives have seen the rot of liberalism setting in long before Rousseau critiqued and radicalized it. Looking at Manent’s account, isn’t the will essentially unfettered as early as Locke? Whether or not Locke entertained notions of total, Rousseau-like revolution — Deneen notes that Locke does goes so far as to question even the authority of parents over children — the legislative supremacy he proposes to uphold men’s rights could quite easily become a means by which willful people might attempt to remake themselves and their society. What Montesquieu recommends as a remedy may only add to the problem — instantiating popular sovereignty in an executive as well as a legislature means that diffuse “will” has been given the only effective outlet it can have, a single actor. The stage is set for a demagogue who claims his own will is the perfect reflection of society’s will. As Manent observes in passing, a single will can represent the idea of will (anybody’s will) much better than can a fractious group.

Deneen, I think, is immediately concerned with the dissolution of the social order and the loss of truth, but it’s worth keeping in mind that these things are not just changes in human feelings or lamentable social trends. Anomie is only the beginning; what follows is the attempt to overcome it by force and will.

This, unfortunately, is where reactionaries or radical conservatives meet their doom. If liberal conservatives are on the side of modernity’s first wave, radical conservatives look and sound a lot like men swept up in modernity’s second and third waves — they turn into Rousseau, except that where Rousseau idolized the past but believed it irretrievably lost, the reactionary or radical conservative thinks that liberalism can and should be extirpated completely, allowing a reconstruction of Christendom or some other golden age — Rome, Sparta, the Teutoburg Forest. A passage from Irving Babbitt that I recently spotted, in a 1929 Saturday Review of Literature essay titled “Benda and French Ideas,” makes the point. Benda, says Babbitt approvingly, “has taken issue not only with the modernists, but with many of the enemies of modernism … and is unable to see that ‘integral nationalism’ of the type promoted by L’Action Francaise is genuinely Catholic or classical. Rousseau would, as a matter of fact, have the right to say (in the words of Emerson’s Brahma) of many of those who profess to be reacting from him: ‘When me they fly, I am the wings’.”

I would contend that Burke, whom Strauss considered a first-wave liberal, actually avoids the extremes of a self-defeating liberalism or a self-aggrandizing radicalism. Burke may begin as a liberal conservative, a moderate Whig, but he becomes something else after his encounter with the French Revolution, moving simultaneously “backward” (by reaffirming the pre-liberal institutions of church, state, and family while amending popular sovereignty) and “forward” (by embracing history as the medium of political validation — this is something Manent discusses that would take too long to explain here; suffice it to say that history comes to play after Rousseau a role once played by philosophy). He continues to be “liberal” in that he doesn’t imagine returning to a confessional state, but he now affirms the pre-liberal as well, and uses the “post-liberal” medium of history to reconcile these apparently irreconcilable elements — history shows the persistence of tradition, as well as breaks as philosophical revolutions. The liberal world of modernity has not completely lost the pre-liberal traditions of Christendom (and to some extent the classical world), even if modern philosophers have moved very far from them.

The Burkean position is hardly unassailable, but I think it derives great strength from recognizing a need to reconcile, in a dynamic fashion, these pre-liberal, liberal, and post-liberal elements. “Reconcile” may be too strong a word: keeping them from destroying one another would be a start. The Burkean thus may have to scale back first-wave liberalism as well as second- and third-wave willfulness, but he does not attempt, as the reactionary does, to scrap liberalism in a counter-revolution that will bring about the personal and social fulfillment that the epigones of Charles Maurras desire at least as much as the followers of Rousseau. It’s perhaps characteristic of the Burkean conservative that he does not think a much more integrated personality is possible in this era, but just as Burkean politics might keep the tidal forces of liberalism from ripping society apart, Burkean conservatism may provide an analogy for the kind of mindset needed to face modernity’s discontents.

Burkean lessons apply to the United States in a complicated way. On the one hand, I think Deneen is correct that there’s a certain logical progression from constitutionalism to the willful socio-politics that we have today. (Note, by the way, that nothing better illustrates how Rousseauvian America has become than a supposedly Christian president’s aide asserting that “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”) Constitutionalism is not only feeble in response to the demands of modern man — it amounts to saying, “Don’t want what you want, just want the law” — but to some extent it actively demolishes the pre-liberal institutions and habits that could resist tide. On the other hand, for all its flaws and whatever its defective tendencies, constitutionalism is not identical with the politics of will, and in some respects it restricts the progress of will. That is, even if there is a logical progression from constitutionalism to, say, Caesarism, it may be the case that without constitutionalism Caesarism is reached even more quickly. The challenge for the Burkean is to strengthen the virtues of the constitutionalist tradition while looking beyond it — and behind it — to the older habits and ideas that can patch its defects.

The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, which includes my Kendall essay, will be out next month from the University of Kentucky Press. Meanwhile, out now from the Mises Institute is Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard, which features Rothbard’s take on Kendall (along with such other notable figures as Charles A. Beard, George Kennan, and Eric Voegelin). As one might expect, Rothbard does not find Kendall’s ideas congenial: on the contrary, as Rothbard sees things, “Kendall has set forth the philosophy of tyranny cogently” and “the Kendallian doctrine is the Enemy.”

The Kendall material in Strictly Confidential comes from a 1956 report Rothbard wrote on the Yale professor’s Buck Hills Falls lectures, which previewed many themes that would subsequently be worked out in The Conservative Affirmation and various Kendall essays. Rothbard tends to agree with Kendall’s criticism of government by experts, which Kendall sees as characteristic of modern liberalism, but he is utterly opposed Kendall’s alternative, an unbridled majority rule — indeed, something that could be called majoritarian dictatorship. Rothbard considers Kendall’s thought to be even more antithetical to libertarianism than the ideas of Russell Kirk and the “New Conservatives” of the 1950s:

Kirk is the philosopher of old pre–Industrial Revolution, High Anglican England, the land of the squire, the Church, the happy peasant, and the aristocratic bureaucratic caste. He is essentially and basically antidemocratic. Kendall, on the contrary, is, as I have said, the patron of the lynch mob—he is an ur-democrat, a Jacobin impatient of any restraints on his beloved community. He hates bureaucracy, but not as we do, because it is tyrannical; he hates it because it has usurped control from the popular masses. He is the sort of person whom the [Clinton] Rossiter-[Peter] Viereck “new conservatives” are combating, for they are trying to defend the existent rule of the leftist bureaucracy against any populist mass upheaval. So they—the leftists—have shifted from mob whippers to soothing conservatives.

Kendall not only argues that a majority should get its way in politics; he goes so far as to argue that the Athenian public was right to condemn Socrates to death, indeed it had a duty to do so, for the alternative would have been either to accept Socrates’ teachings (which the Athenians were not prepared to do) or to treat the fundamental questions that Socrates raised as matters of indifference. Rothbard’s criticism extends Kendall’s doctrine ad absurdum, arguing that any innovation that would change a community must, on Kendall’s account, be forbidden by the majority. Otherwise the community would be surrendering its own identity to a subversive element.

How fair is all of this? Kendall was certainly no libertarian. But he was not the totalitarian that one might think from some of his more provocative statements. Rothbard does not draw out the connection between what he finds agreeable in Kendall — the criticism of modern liberalism as a covert form of domination over the public by an ideological elite — and the majoritarianism he finds objectionable. For Kendall, political power is a given; whatever scruples anyone might have about the use of force, and whatever written laws may be in place, ultimately somebody is holding a sword. Modern liberalism is not the tolerant, peaceful thing it claims to be because its political order is still based on conformity and force; the sword is wielded by a expert class that disguises its dominance over everyone else with empty language about rights. (To the extent that anyone actually believes that language, even within the expert class, they are putting their own necks under the sword’s edge.)

Various political thinkers have argued that different classes, castes, or factions should wield the sword. Kendall, however, sees a straightforward categorical division: either the majority wields the sword, or some minority, a special interest of some sort, wields it. Kendall, following his interpretation of Locke and the American political system, believes that the majority should wield power. (Later, Kendall’s views will become more complex: he continues to hew to majoritarianism, but he becomes critical of Locke and draws a distinction between different kinds of majority rule — a bad, plebiscitary kind, and a good, structured kind that he identifies with the best parts of the American tradition.)

Kendall would see Rothbard’s idea that everyone should adhere to a framework of liberty derived from property rights (including self-ownership) as irrelevant to political theory. Kendall also might not like the Rothbardian credo, but his personal preferences can be separated from his philosophy, and it seems to me the more important Kendallian philosophical point is that no ideology of rights or rearrangement of institutions eradicates power from human life. In a Kendallian view, Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism can just as fairly be called a dictatorship of the property owners as Kendall’s majoritarianism can be called a dictatorship of the majority. The “dictator” in either system need not be sadist; indeed, he could be an enlightened despot, full of the milk of human kindness and absolutely determined to harm no one. But ultimately someone is holding the sword, and it is the sword-holder’s disposition that determines how much liberty or license other people may have. Kendall is not totally indifferent to liberty: he does, however, believe that ordinary people will have the best judgment of what liberty should mean and that ordinary people as a whole will tend to have less tyrannical impulses than any minority faction.

In this, Kendall more or less explicitly affirms what he considers to be John Locke’s “latent premise” — Locke can be a majoritarian and a believer in natural rights, according to Kendall in John Locke and the Doctrine Of Majority-Rule, because he tacitly assumes that the majority can be trusted to abide by those rights. Kendall and Rothbard are both Lockeans — even the later Kendall, who repudiates Locke himself, still retains some “Lockean” characteristics — but of very different species: Rothbard emphasizes a natural-rights Locke, Kendall a majoritarian Locke.

There are plenty of problems with majoritarianism, beginning with the question of just how “majoritarian” it actually is. Isn’t talk about majority rule just a disguise for rule by another kind of elite, much as talk about human rights and tolerance is? I don’t recall Kendall tackling this question head on, but I suspect that beyond whatever confidence he puts in democratic political machinery (which was sometimes quite a bit, especially where the U.S. Constitution was concerned), he might also see a strong cultural component in the desire and ability of a government to express the popular will. His interest in Rousseau (who seems also to have such a thing in mind) suggests as much. (Kendall translated and wrote introduction for The Social Contract and The Government of Poland.) In any case, there is plenty of cause for skepticism about the merits of majority rule, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about whether Kendall’s absolute majoritarianism is as incompatible with broad view of liberty as Rothbard thought.

An anarcho-capitalist society, after all, might well decide not to tolerate communists proselytizing on private property. (And if there is no public property, that means not tolerating communist speech at all.) Indeed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe insists on this point in Democracy: The God That Failed:

As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, notoriously wanted to ban certain Tory books, including Hume’s History of England, from the University of Virginia’s libraries. The point I would make is that in any community, whether democratic or anarcho-capitalist or what have you, somebody is going to be drawing lines dividing permissible opinions from speech acts that endanger the society order. One might choose to be far more latitudinarian than Kendall, Hoppe, or Jefferson, but don’t confuse latitudinarianism with the belief that one’s own limits upon expression aren’t really limits at all. Liberals, Kendall and Rothbard would agree, say they are committed to complete free speech when in practice they are not; but more than that, even someone who sincerely believes in total expressive freedom has probably just failed to recognize his own innate beliefs about where limits should be drawn.

The question of what limits should exist is both distinct from and intimately connected to the question of who should rule. Only the “ruler,” in the abstract, is able to establish the limits (and the conversely the freedoms) that he wants to see in society. The questions that Kendall raises, and the sometimes extreme form in which he poses them, should be helpful to anyone who wants to think seriously about political philosophy. They are questions that even a Rothbardian must confront, even if the answers he comes up with are very different from Kendall’s.