So who was this John C. Calhoun, someone who has so many sticky burrs attached to his reputation? And why turn our attention to him in this year of 2025? I. Constitutional Federalism Is a system whereby a written constitution divides and shares powers between a General Government and constituent state governments with each having [...]
The fiercely contested, yet inconclusive election of 1824 set the stage for one of the great debates of American political history. “Mr. Onslow, the ablest among Speakers of the House of Commons, used to say ‘It was a maxim he had often heard when he was a young man, from old and experienced members, that [...]
Perhaps no American thinker has suffered more from a scholarly hegemony of discourse than John C. Calhoun, whose work and personage are often dismissed by his critics for a single phrase attributed to him, diminishing the careful and complicated analysis he deserves. The careful reader does not have to be a devotee of Jürgen Habermas [...]
Will a Sanders-like agenda produce eventual Democratic success at the polls? Maybe so or maybe not. Either way, it could lead to the achievement of Senator Sanders’ cherished goal of an American Sweden. While Senator Bernie Sanders may never be president, his oft-stated goal may one day be realized. This is especially so, if his [...]
Lord Acton believed that the wrong side won the American Civil War. Such a judgment could hardly be said to be a minor detail of someone’s historical worldview, yet this judgment has somehow been obscured. “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to [...]
When Andrew Jackson learned that John C. Calhoun had been deceiving him for more than a decade, Jackson understandably exploded in rage. While Andrew Jackson was moving against the Seminoles, the Spanish, and the British in Florida in the late 1810s, he had assumed that his closest ally in President James Monroe’s cabinet was John [...]
The greatest tragedy of America’s past is that racism was present not only in its worst villains, but also in some of its greatest public figures. We cannot debase the positive contributions of those who had moral failings, but we also cannot idolize the American Founders under the false pretension that vice did not exist [...]
When the second generation of Americans inherited the leadership of the republic, they must have felt, in equal measure, a mix of immense pride and a sense of dread… I often imagine how difficult it must have been to be the son of a Founding Father. Can you imagine trying to live up to what [...]
Far from feeding disunion, John C. Calhoun understood that a more perfect Union listened to the representative voices of the states, rather than the despotic voice of the “nation” represented in the federal Congress. I recently read two essays: one bemoaning the electoral college, and another explaining that Yale University was considering renaming Calhoun College. [...]
The misguided effort to have Yale University rename Calhoun College is a sign that we contemporary Americans have a tendency to forget who we are, and to engage in what has become known as political correctness. The advocates of political correctness want to corrupt history for temporary political gain, and their efforts are, sadly, a [...]
According to John C. Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson served as the “Republican Patriarch,” the political thinker who had incorporated the republican understanding of liberty into a theory of federal relationships most conducive to the life of the community and political order. John Caldwell Calhoun inherited the social and political tradition of his South Atlantic world, confirmed [...]
John C. Calhoun Click here for Part I Put aside this literal biblical history. A man abstracted from a community and from history, Calhoun believed, in the vein of Aristotle, is not a man at all, but a mere animal. All men, Calhoun argued, are born into varying states of authority—the authority of [...]
John C. Calhoun Last weekend, I had the grand privilege of working with Emily Corwin, Adam Tate, and Richard Brake at a co-sponsored ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium in Philadelphia. Held at the gorgeous Omni, we overlooked Independence Hall. Our topic: Union, republic, and nullification. As I have been so many times in my adult [...]
The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters. Edited with an Introduction by Clyde Wilson. Foreword by Russell Kirk. The contemporary academic interpretation of John Caldwell Calhoun is like the contemporary academic response to anything and anyone thoroughly and unmistakably Southern: a politically correct caricature, both as to motives and with regard to the meaning of [...]