Book Review
A Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States
By John C. Calhoun
Publication date 1851
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An audio version of this review is available at anchor.fm.
About the Author
John Caldwell Calhoun (1782 – 1850) graduated from Yale as valedictorian in 1804. He studied law at the nation's first independent law school, Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he worked with Tapping Reeve and James Gould. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807. He began his political career with election from South Carolina to the US House of Representatives in 1810. He was a prominent leader of the war hawk faction and strongly supported the War of 1812. He served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe, fifth US president 1817-1825. In the late 1820's he became a leading proponent of states' rights, limited government, nullification, and opposition to high tariffs. Calhoun was a candidate for the presidency in the 1824 election. He was seventh vice president of the United States from 1825 to 1832 under presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. In 1832 he entered the Senate. He was a candidate for the presidency in the 1844 election. Calhoun served as Secretary of State under President John Tyler from 1844 to 1845. Calhoun returned to the Senate, where he opposed the Mexican–American War, the Wilmot Proviso, and the Compromise of 1850.
Historian Lee H. Cheek, Jr., author of Calhoun and Popular Rule: The Political Theory of Disquisition and Discourse University of Missouri Press 2001, distinguishes between two strands of American republicanism: the puritan tradition, based in New England, and the agrarian or South Atlantic tradition, which Cheek argues was espoused by Calhoun. While the New England tradition stressed a politically centralized enforcement of moral and religious norms to secure civic virtue, the South Atlantic tradition relied on a decentralized moral and religious order based on the idea of subsidiarity (or localism). Cheek maintains that the "Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions" (1798), written by Jefferson and Madison, were the cornerstone of Calhoun's republicanism. Calhoun emphasized the primacy of subsidiarity—holding that popular rule is best expressed in local communities that are nearly autonomous while serving as units of a larger society.
About the Book
From Wikipedia, "Calhoun's ideas on the concurrent majority are illustrated in A Disquisition on Government. The Disquisition is a 100-page essay on Calhoun's definitive and comprehensive ideas on government, which he worked on intermittently for six years until its 1849 completion. It systematically presents his arguments that a numerical majority in any government will typically impose a despotism over a minority unless some way is devised to secure the assent of all classes, sections, and interests and, similarly, that innate human depravity would debase government in a democracy."
From Amazon, "...the arguments that Calhoun expressed about minority rights in democracies in A Disquisition On Government remain an excellent example of how problem solving skills and reasoning can come together. The problem, for Calhoun, was both specific and general. As matters stood in the late 1840s, the majority of American states were anti-slavery, with only the minority, Southern states remaining pro-slavery. This boiled down to a crucial issue with democracy: the US government should not, Calhoun argued, only respect the wishes of the majority. Instead, democratic government must aim to harmonize diverse groups and their interests – governing, in so far as possible, for everyone."
This book's popularity is demonstrated in the fact that its Amazon rank is #123 in the category "Government". Customer Reviews rate it an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars.
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