Heritage History Month Day Thirteen: John C. Calhoun

Happy John Calhoun Day!

For day thirteen of Heritage History month, we celebrate the eminent Southern statesman and political theorist John C Calhoun. It’s frankly impossible to summarize Calhoun’s intellectual achievements in a four paragraph Twitter thread, but Calhoun is very likely the greatest exponent of a realist political theory that America ever produced. He anticipated Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction by warning about the “wrath of the patient adversary.”

A century before James Burnham wrote on the realities of Machiavellian politics, Calhoun declared that “Power can only be resisted by power -- and tendency by tendency.” That is to say, the success of maintaining one’s liberties and way of life does not come about by “changing hearts and minds” or by the free market but rather by wielding an appropriate amount of power to counter and confront the power-block that seeks to disrupt your way of life. In this way, Calhoun would have scoffed at the idea that the Constitution itself could stop tyranny; without the prerogative possessed by true centers of power, there was nothing that could actually resist political enemies.

Calhoun was a Conservative in the old, Burkean sense; that is, he adamantly rejected the universalist bent of the Natural Rights theorists and those who saw society as being the product of individual consent or believed in transcendent political values that bound all human beings in the same way. Rather, much like myself, Calhoun is a historicist who justified political elements like rights or laws on the basis of historical development and the importance of custom and continuity. Society, Calhoun argued, preceded the individual and shaped him and afforded him the rights and duties that he finds himself in possession of.

This means that Calhoun was a particularist: every community has its own way of doing things, its own laws, its own scale of political priorities and governing structure, its own economic needs and framework of production. He viscously opposed centralization trends in the nineteenth century that would have seen his homeland in the South become an outpost of Northern industrial interests.

Calhoun, more than many other Southerners at the time, had a political mind that was able to see decades ahead. He understood with remarkable foresight that the structural elements of nineteenth century politics were headed for a type of stand-off that would culminate in Civil War. He therefore urged his contemporaries to think more seriously about the realities of power and the dynamic between majorities and minorities in the framework of collective-democratic contests (at that time, the idea of democracy as a collection of mass individual voters was a foreign concept).

Calhoun was not only a prophet of civil war, but one of the few that had the solutions necessary to prevent it. He advocated the very things that Americans now most need: nullification, state-level dissent, and the ability of localities to exercise their power to challenge a centralized government gone rogue. Americans would do well to remember Calhoun’s declaration:

“I never use the word nation in speaking of the United States. I always use the word Union or Confederacy. We are not a nation but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign States.”