George W. Carey (1933–2013)
Georgetown University political scientist (1961–2013); student of Willmoore Kendall at Yale; co-author with Kendall of The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970, posthumous for Kendall); editor of The Political Science Reviewer; the figure who carried the populist-majoritarian, anti-Lockean reading of the American founding through the academy from Kendall’s generation to the post-2000 paleoconservative inheritors.
Why He Matters Here
Carey is the principal academic transmitter of Kendall’s populist-majoritarian, deliberative-legislative-supremacy reading of the American constitutional order. The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (which Carey completed and published after Kendall’s 1967 death) is the canonical statement of the position: the American tradition is Mayflower-Compact Christian-republican, not Declaration-of-Independence Lockean-individualist.
This reading is the paleoconservative reading that Jaffa’s Declarationism was constructed against (see Beyond Originalism). Without Carey’s continuation, the Kendall position would have lapsed; with him, it remained available for the Bradford-Dallas-paleoconservative line and, indirectly, for Deneen’s Notre Dame anti-Lockean Catholic political theory.
Cross-References
- Willmoore Kendall — teacher and co-author
- M.E. Bradford — fellow-traveler in the populist-majoritarian register
- Beyond Originalism — Kersch’s genealogy
- Harry V. Jaffa — primary antagonist
- Patrick Deneen — distant inheritor
- Paleoconservatism
Stub — included to support Willmoore Kendall cross-references.