John C. Calhoun

This 2014 essay discussed the issue of same-sex marriage in the context of judicial review principles.  Although the U.S. Supreme Court held that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right in 2015, the reflections in the paper on judicial review were not modified by that decision.

This essay contends that we can better understand Andrew Jackson’s distinctive account of federalism by looking outside the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian political traditions. More appropriate peers for Jackson, as a constitutional statesman, are John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln. Existing treatments of Jackson miss these connections because they focus primarily on his roles as party leader and reformer, to the neglect of his constitutional statesmanship. A major cause of this neglect is the apparent inconsistency between Jackson’s “nationalist” account of the Union in the Nullification Proclamation and his advocacy of “states’ rights” elsewhere, a tension that can be resolved by a closer reading of Jackson’s rhetoric. Among other things, this redefinition of Jackson’s legacy demonstrates that there is no necessary tension between a strong Union and meaningful limits on federal power; nor is there a necessary affinity between narrow construction of federal power and state compact theory.

La questione della secessione si inserisce nell'orizzonte più vasto della crisi della sovranità che ha indotto filosofi, politologi e giuristi a interrogarsi su percorsi ed esiti possibili delle spinte centrifughe sugli assetti statuali. Sino ad oggi il tema tuttavia è stato affrontato più su un piano politico-propagandistico che come questione rilevante per la filosofia politica e la teoria del diritto. Spesso associata all'autodeterminazione, la secessione è in realtà distinta da essa e anzi costituisce un ottimo angolo visuale per osservare i limiti di quel concetto. Ricostruendone criticamente e in una prospettiva comparata i profili, l'autrice vede nella secessione una complessa questione inerente alla relazione fra sistemi giuridici e sistemi politici. Per sua stessa natura "diritto" incerto e virtualmente distruttivo, la secessione ambisce tuttavia ad essere un vero e proprio diritto, in questo modo configurandosi come l'"ultimo diritto": l'ultima posizione di vantaggio che si può trarre da un sistema che viene abbandonato e che si espone al rischio della dissoluzione.

Yıl 1958,

John B. Calhoun, adlı ABD’li bir davranış araştırmacısı II. Dünya Savaşı sonrasında artan nüfus artışının dünyada oluşturacağı etkileri araştırmak için bir deney tasarlar.

Deneyler serisi 1958-1962 arasında Norveç sıçanları, 1968-1972 arasında ise farelerle gerçekleştirir.

Çalışmaları sonrasında yazdığı “Popülasyon Yoğunluğu ve Sosyal Patoloji” başlıklı makalede “davranış batağı” terimini yaratır.

“Toplumsal çöküş”ü anlatan bu deneyler serisi sonucunda ortaya çıkan ünlü deneye “Universe 25” (25. Evren) adını verir.

In Benito Cereno, Melville indicts Northern moderates who thought that civil relations between Northern and Southern whites could bind together a splintering nation. Mocking the notion of benevolent white authority, he explores the danger—and the impossibility—of omitting black men and women from meaningful conceptions of sociality.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article begins a semiregular feature in which contributors analyze “texts” that figure in the daily lives of college English teachers; e.g. syllabi, course descriptions, administrative decrees, departmental bylaws, college Web site.  Your proposals are invited.  Here, Susanna Ashton describes how undergraduates in her class on representations of slavery studied the words, sounds, and images they encountered at a historical site on her campus: the former slave plantation of leading antebellum racist John C. Calhoun. She also analyzes how her school depicts this site on the Web.  In effect, she raises the issue of how any college might teach about ignoble aspects of its past.

As Madison argued both in 1833 and in 1787-88, majority rule reflects the best version of democratic governance given the limitations of human nature and our constitutional arrangements.
https://startingpointsjournal.com/on-madisons-majoritarianism/

This article explores an early attempt to establish a constitutional constraint on tariffs utilizing the Laffer Curve relationship. In 1842 John Calhoun suggested that the curve’s revenue maximization apex could be used to differentiate between “Revenue” and “Protective” tariffs independently from the non-judiciable question of legislative motive. When admitted that a tax must actually be collected to remain constitutionally valid, the apex functions as a de facto upper tariff rate constraint. Despite subsequently falling in disfavor, Calhoun’s argument illustrates the importance of political economy on the constitutional level by recognizing conditions that induce policymakers to rationally raise tax rates.

The disputed election of 1824 was one of the most important presidential elections in American history. After an indecisive electoral college vote, the House of Representatives selected John Quincy Adams as president over the more popular war hero, Andrew Jackson. As a result, John C. Calhoun ended up serving as vice-president under Adams. Neither man was comfortable in this situation as they were political rivals who held philosophically divergent views of American constitutional governance. The emerging personal and philosophical dispute between President Adams and Vice-President Calhoun eventually prompted the two men (and Adams’s political supporters) to take up their pens, using the pseudonyms “Patrick Henry” and “Onslow,” in a public debate over the nature of power and liberty in a constitutional republic. The great debate thus arrayed Calhoun’s Jeffersonian republican vision of constitutionally restrained power and local autonomy against Adams’s neo-Federalist republican vision which called for the positive use of inherent power—a view that would become increasingly compelling to future generations of Americans. In the course of this exchange some of the most salient issues within American politics and liberty are debated, including the nature of political order, democracy, and the diffusion of political power. The level of erudition and insight is remarkable. The “Patrick Henry”/”Onslow” Debate deserves a wider popular and scholarly audience.

The War of 1812 was more about the expansion of the United States into Canada and Florida than it was about freedom of the seas. The main support for the war came from the frontier regions in the West rather than the maritime region in New England. Vageries in the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase led to the United States annexed West and East Florida and arranging for a joint occupation of the Oregon Territory. Meanwhile in Latin America, Napoleon's invasion of Spain and placing his brother on the Spanish throne provided the opportunity for the Spanish colonies in Latin America to declare their independence. The paper compares Simon Bolivar to George Washington and Napoleon, all three military leaders, but with different views about government. Finally, the paper views the Monroe doctrine in terms of what William Appleman Williams termed "imperial anticolonialism."

ABSTRACT This article explores how proposals for democratizing the EU according to a supranational, contestational model are likely to disrupt its existing political system. The current EU is characterized by a dual system of representation that combines the representation of member states with that of individual citizens. Democratization typically entails enhancing the representation of individuals at the expense of state prerogatives. It is thus possible to make a pertinent analogy with the antebellum US, which also featured dual representation, and where a great wave of democratization took place following Jackson's presidency. As the system of representation became more majoritarian, John C. Calhoun led the calls for introducing new anti-majoritarian constitutional safeguards. This transatlantic comparison suggests the contestational system born of EU democratization will require institutional innovation in order to prove viable. In this context, Calhoun's theory of nullification, an ex post political mechanism wielded by the units to stymie federal legislation, appears more appropriate as an anti-majoritarian bulwark and better able to engender constitutional debate over competences than the EU's stillborn judicial principle of subsidiarity. In similarly Calhounian fashion, a bottom-up procedure of constitutional amendment originating in the units is further proposed as a way of establishing unit acquiescence to greater supranationalism.

A mythic interpretive framework can explain how the use of an uncontested term-a word which "seems to invite a contest, but which apparently is not so regarded in its own context"-is legitimated and perpetuated. By examining John C. Calhoun's nullification rhetoric as a case study of political myth (specifically his "Disquisition on Government" and Senate speeches opposing the Force Bill), this persuasive character of myth comes more clearly into focus. Arguing for the nullificaticn of thz 1;:ideral Government, Calhoun's rhetoric evoked the mythic elements of absolute good and evil, conspiracy, and heroes and redemption. Political myths such as these channel audiences' actions, particularly through the use of uncontested terms, and can therefore become grounds for action Political Myth and Social Action: John C. Calhoun's Defense of Nullificv.ion Richard Weaver defines an uncontested term as a word which "seems to invite a contest, but which apparently is not so regarded in its own context" (166). Uncontested terms emerge in rhetorical artifacts as imprecisely .efined abstractions which nonetheless bear persuasive potendy.

The sound of breaking glass in the then named Calhoun College, a residential undergraduate college of Yale University in the summer of 2016, was a wake-up call to university administrators regarding the university's history and its relationship to its employees from New Haven and its student body, many of whom are people of color. While other academic institutions have moved from the sidelines of addressing their institutional history of racism, Yale moves slower, only in 2017 renaming Calhoun College Grace Hopper College after Corey Menafee, a dishwasher, took a broom handle to a painting on stained glass of enslaved women and men in a cotton field,  pushing it out of its frame, where it smashed on the sidewalk below.  This brief presentation was part of the symposium, "Universities, Slavery, Public Memory & the Built Landscape, held at the University of Virginia, October 18-21, 2017, as part of the school's 200th anniversary celebrations.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President of the United States in March 1861, eight Southern States had seceded from the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln appealed to his "fellow citizens" to settle their differences peacefully, however, he stated that the Union was "perpetual" and "organic."

However, the Constitution of the United States was ambiguous about whether it was a union of the people as a whole or a union of states that ratified it. The issue for came to the fore in 1798 with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, penned by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively, argued that the Constitution was a compact between the states, and the states had the power to judge whether an act of Congress was constituional or not. The matter was supposedly settled by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison.

However, the issue surfaced again during the War of 1812, when New Englanders opposed to the war met in Hartford, Connecticut, and passed a series of resolutions and hintied at taking unspecified further actions if their resolutions were ignored. Fortunately, the war ended before they had to resort to any such measures.

It is was issues of protective tariffs and the exension of slavery to the western territories that finally led to the secession of Southern States from the Union. A second generation of American leaders debated these issues led by Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Henry Clay of Kentucky proposed an "American System" of internal improvements, a protective tariff, and a national banking system that he hoped would integrate the sections of the country into a single national economy. He allso the Missouri Compromise as a way to settle the issue of the extension of slavery to the west yet maintaining the balance between slave and free states.

After the Mexican War the issue arose again over whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories in the Southwest conquered from Mexico. In this case, Stephen Douglas of Illinois came forward with another compromise in 1850 based on the pirnciple of "popular sovereignty." However, this compromise was upset by the Dred Scott decision in 1857 that asserted the principle that slaveowners could bring their property in slaves to all parts of the country. Abraham Lincoln made a national reputation for himself by debating Douglas on these issues.

Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery to the territories, but said he did not have the power to abolish slavery where it already existed. Nevertheless, his election as president in 1860 convinced the South that the balance between free and slave states would be upset, which prompted secession. Lincoln maintained that secession was illegal and thus the Southern States were in "rebellion." However, after the war there was the question of whether the Confederate states could simply resume their ante-bellum status during Reconstruction. The legal matter was finally settled by the Supreme Court case of White v. Texas in 1869, stating that the secession was illegal. But the moral issue also was raised by Lincoln, when he states revolution was only justified when its cause was "morally justifiable."

Although John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) remains one of the major figures in American political thought, many of his critics have tried to discredit him as merely a Southern partisan whose ideas were obsolete even during his lifetime. In Calhoun and Popular Rule, H. Lee Cheek, Jr., attempts to correct such misconceptions by presenting Calhoun as an original political thinker who devoted his life to the recovery of a "proper mode of popular rule." He argues that Calhoun had a coherent, systematic view of human nature and society and made a lasting contribution to the theory of constitutionalism and democracy.

Cheek suggests that Calhoun was not a political or philosophical aberration, but an authentic exponent of American constitutionalism. He contends that Calhoun's view of democracy forms part of a philosophy of humankind and politics that has relevance beyond the American experience. Although his idea of popular rule was original, it was also related to earlier attempts in America and elsewhere to limit the power of the majority and protect minority interests. According to Cheek, Calhoun stood in the American political tradition and attempted to rearticulate some of its central elements. He explains Calhoun's idea of the concurrent majority and examines how it has been presented by Calhoun's critics, as well as his followers.

As the first combined evaluation of Calhoun's most important treatises, The Disquisition and The Discourse, this work merges Calhoun's theoretical position with his endeavors to restore the need for popular rule. It also compares Calhoun's ideas with those of other great political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison--while explaining what is truly unique about Calhoun's political thought.

Calhoun's philosophy—his understanding of the need for ethical and political restraint and for institutional means for obtaining concurrence—is still relevant today, especially given the current growing ethnic and cultural conflict of the Western world. Scholars of government, American history, and political thought, as well as those interested in understanding "popular rule" and its theoretical and practical impact on modern American government, will find this groundbreaking work to be of great value.