Killing Socrates
Why Willmoore Kendall is Revelant Again
By Eric Scheske

He was an ugly man. Broad, flat nose; thick lips; large paunch. His good friend Alcibiades said he had the face of a satyr. Aristophanes said he strutted like a waterfowl.

But for the past 150 years, Socrates has been a poster boy.

He's been the poster boy for the extremist open society movement that started to gain broad influence with J.S. Mill's essay On Liberty (1859).

For Mill, there are no settled questions and so, for the good of society, no speech ought to be suppressed, except in extreme circumstances (e.g., obscenity channeled to children and incitement to particular types of crime). It is wrong to silence any opinion or stifle the civil rights of those who hold certain opinions, no matter how vociferous or active they are, and no matter how subversive they are to the framework of society.

Socrates, of course, was killed because of his conduct and speech. Mill remembered it, and adopted him: "Mankind cannot be too often reminded that there was once a man named Socrates." Or, put less eloquently: Socrates was killed for exercising civil liberties. Socrates was wise. Therefore suppressing civil liberties is unwise.

Scarcely anyone has questioned this sloppy syllogism during the modern era. And everyone has agreed that the hemlocking of Socrates was wholly wrong.

Except one man: Willmoore Kendall.

Born in 1909 to a blind minister in Oklahoma, he learned to read at two, graduated from high school at 13 and college at 18, published his first book at 20. In 1932, he became a Rhodes scholar and studied at Oxford. He became a communist and went to Spain in the 1930s where exposure to the tartarean reality of the Spanish Republic shocked him. He obtained a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois in 1940, worked for the CIA during World War II, then joined the Yale University faculty in 1947, where he taught for fourteen quarrelsome years until Yale finally paid him a handsome sum to resign. As a Senior Editor of National Review, he constantly fought with the other editors (they say he was never on speaking terms with more than one person at a time). He later taught at the University of Dallas where he stayed until his death in 1968.

This brilliant but strange and often mean-spirited man was also an astute critic of Mill's version of the open society.

In light of 9/11, most people are beginning to understand that a society's openness can close it. If a society allows expansive civil liberties to all persons, including those who hold ideas and values that undermine a society's liberal order of freedom and toleration, then it runs the risk of great damage (terrorist attacks) and the risk of elimination (the threat facing France: an illiberal minority becoming the majority and changing the statutes and amending the constitution to fit their illiberal ideas).

This gives rise to the difficult task of balancing civil rights against society's self-preservation.

Re-reading Kendall can help us remember how our society is defined, which acts and opinions are unhealthy to our society's self-understanding, and which acts and opinions are downright dangerous. Kendall valued liberty, but he was also acutely aware that, as Justice Jackson said in Terminello v. Chicago (1949), the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.

In his essay, "The People Versus Socrates Revisited" (1958), Kendall, by a close examination of the Apology and the Crito, re-evaluated Socrates' trial and execution. His conclusions were two-fold:

(1) Socrates wasn't as open as people think. Socrates emphasized that he carried the truth. Moreover, it was truth that God revealed to him. He didn't merely want a chance to be heard in Athens. He wanted a revolution. He wanted Athenian society to change and follow the truth he had found. Specifically, Socrates wanted the Athenians to abandon their lust for money and trade and to pursue virtue and God.

(2) The Athenians, on the other hand, weren't as close-minded as Mill and progeny want us to believe. They listened to Socrates, for over thirty years, letting him talk and debate ad nauseum. And when they finally called him to trial, they tried to be lenient with him. And his response? Same adamancy: Allow him to continue his battle against Athenian society or kill him.

Kendall's point is that the Athenians had a good society. Yes, it was second best compared to the idea proposed by Socrates, but it wasn't bad and the Athenians knew they had a good thing going. (Heck, it nurtured the likes of Socrates and Plato.) They reasonably thought Socrates wanted to destroy it, and therefore it was not unreasonable for them to stop him.

It's a surprising conclusion that most of us wouldn't accept, but Kendall makes a strong case for it and, in the process, makes a strong case against extremist forms of the open society.

Kendall's heightened scrutiny of the open society stemmed from his hatred of communism and his (correct) belief that during his lifetime communists were trying to take advantage of America's openness in efforts to undermine it.

Francis Wilson, one of Kendall's professors, wrote of his anti-communism: "Apparently, liberal and kind-hearted Americans believe all men are good and that all issues can be resolved by a little amiable conversation; hence, the communists could hardly be in any case a menace to the security of the United States. But Kendall . . . held that this is not so: communists are just not like this. They are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to bring about the communist revolution everywhere, and the greatest enemy of communistic progress after World War II has been and is the United States."

Kendall thought Socrates was an unstable societal force because Socrates uncompromisingly claimed truth from God and demanded that the Athenians adopt a way of life that emanates from that truth. Kendall hated the communists because they weren't interested in "amiable conversation," but rather wanted world domination.

Now, if a person combines Socrates with communism, might he get something that resembles Islam?

Islam acts from divine revelation. It insists on particular rules of behavior (the shari'a). It strives for world domination (through jihad).

There are, of course, shades of Islam and different understandings among Muslims about these doctrines, but jihad is a fundamental goal of all Muslims, shari'a is implemented where jihad is successful, and shari'a is based on the word of Allah.

Like America's resistance to communistic progress after WWII, America today is the greatest enemy of Islamic jihad.

And the open society as articulated by Mill and his progeny ties America's hands when dealing with Islamic revolutionaries who would crush America—or tear it down from the inside—in furtherance of jihad.

It's in this growing danger that St. Willmoore (as his students at Dallas would affectionately call him), and his understanding of freedom and societal self-preservation, might help. We won't agree with everything he wrote (he was, for instance, a harsh critic of Russell Kirk, a man whose work I admire). We might be offended by some of his conclusions. We may not like what we see in biographical highlights.

But he wasn’t afraid to attack the extremist form of the open society and did so with uncompromising brilliance. If we want an intelligent framework for dealing domestically with the Islamic threat, he's worth reading and considering.