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A Disquisition on
Government
By John C. Calhoun
1853
In 1993, when President Clinton nominated Lani
Guinier, a legal scholar at Harvard, to be the first black woman to
head the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and again
the following year when her book The Tyranny of the Majority
was published, she was attacked by establishment conservative
commentators such as George F. Will and Lally Weymouth for her
supposed un-American radicalism in arguing that the political majority
at times needs to be "disaggregated" in order to ensure minority
interests. Hilariously, the firebrand youthful naïfs at National
Review attempted to deliver the coup de grâce to Professor
Guinier's argument by observing that her thought on the subject of
minority vs. majority representation echoed that of.John C.
Calhoun! To the neoconservative National Review editors,
the name Calhoun signaled--besides a defense of slavery--disunionism,
disloyalism, extremism, treason. In point of fact, John Calhoun was
one of the most cogently original and genuinely conservative theorists
in the American political tradition; one whose ideas, though indeed
employed by their author in defense of the slave interest, are
intellectually independent from it. Though acquainted with The
Tyranny of the Majority only by hearsay, I suspect that whatever
is valuable in the book derives, either entirely or in large part,
from the writings of the distinguished gentleman from South Carolina,
Senator John C. Calhoun (1782-1850).
His reputation as an un-American reactionary
notwithstanding, Calhoun was in many ways a typically enlightened
American of his day: an optimist and a positivist who believed in
science, technology, and material progress, the eventual triumph of
civilization over barbarism, and popular constitutional government,
and who had faith that both the governing and the governed would, in
time, "better understand the ends for which government is ordained,
and the form best adapted to accomplish them under all the
circumstances in which communities may be respectively placed." (His
optimism, it needs to be added, pertained essentially to Western
societes with a tradition making them fit for liberty and
self-governance. "No people," Calhoun observes in A
Disquisition on Government, ".can long enjoy more liberty than
that to which their situation and advanced intelligence and morals
fairly entitle them." It is a terrible error, he goes on to warn, to
suppose all people equally entitled to liberty; while, "attempting to
elevate a people in the scale of liberty above the point to which they
are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive and end in
disappointment.")
Calhoun's understanding of those ends, however, and
so of the "form" best suited to realize them, was very far from that
of Alexander Hamilton and other avid centralizers of the founding era
who helped to ratify and reify the Constitution of the United States.
Though he had begun his political career in Congress as a nationalist
and a War Hawk, Calhoun chastised the "nationalists" of his own time
for their habit of applying the term "national" to "the general
government of the Union" and "the federal government of these States."
"It seems to be forgotten," he complains in his Discourse on the
American Constitution, that the term was repudiated by the
[Constitutional] Convention after full consideration, and that it was
carefully excluded from the Constitution and the letter laying it
before Congress. Even those who know all this-and, of course, how
falsely the term is applied-have, for the most part, slided into its
use with - out reflection. But there are not a few who so apply it
because they believe it to be a national government in fact; and among
these are men of distinguished talents and standing, who have
put forth all their powers of reason and eloquence in support of the
theory.
For Calhoun, the American system is "a system of
governments," a compound of the separate state governments and of "one
common government of all its members." In this way, it is "[f]ederal,
on the one hand, in contradistinction to national; and, on
the other, to a confederacy." The Constitution, he insists, was
established as a compact between free, independent, and
sovereign states, not a plan of government established over
them. Were it otherwise, he argues, ratification would have amounted
to radical thoroughgoing revolution in the social as well as in the
political sphere, as a single national culture supplanted thirteen
separate and discrete ones. (It is interesting that Calhoun's father,
whose understanding of the Constitution apparently anticipated his
own, opposed ratification even so, on the ground that the centralized
power it envisaged would end by destroying American liberty.)
Yet Calhoun in maturity was not a state's rights
man, a cause with which the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification
in 1832 (based on the earlier Exposition, drafted by himself)
had disillusioned him. Instead, he became a sectionalist, convinced by
the accelerating divergence of interest between the North and the
South, and by the increasing power of the former unfairly to press its
advantage, that only a rearrangement of the political balance could
save the Union in the long run. James Madison had written in The
Federalist (Number 51) that, "It is of great importance to a
republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its
rulers, but to guard one part of society against the injustice of the
other part." The U.S. Constitution, in Calhoun's opinion, had signally
failed to do this: That is to say, it failed to protect the minority
interest against the majority one.
As a mechanism to rectify this wrong by
establishing a fair and appropriate balance between them, Calhoun, in
A Disquisition, suggests what he calls "the doctrine of
the concurrent majority." Under the resulting plan, each sectional or
special-interest majority ( both of them, in respect of the "numerical
majority," a minority interest) would enjoy the constitutional
power to veto acts of the federal government (as the agent of the
numerical majority), when a majority of the minority interest(s)
declared said acts to be contrary to their welfare. What Calhoun calls
"taking the sense of" the people can not be accomplished by the
suffrage alone, which does no more than tabulate, individually, the
choice of the numerical majority. What is needed additionally is to
take the sense of the community in all its parts; "to give to each
interest or portion of the community a negative on the others," thus
ceding each portion the power to act as its own guardian. This
negative power, Calhoun claims, is necessary to any constitution,
since, "It is, indeed, the negative power which makes the constitution
and the positive which makes the government. The one is the power of
acting and the other the power of preventing or arresting action. The
two, combined, make constitutional government."
Calhoun expected priceless benefits from his
doctrine, if realized constitutionally. By giving to each interest, or
portion, the power of self-protection, all strife and struggle between
them for ascendancy is prevented; and thereby, not only every feeling
calculated to weaken the attachment to the whole is suppressed, but
the individual and social feelings are made to unite in one common
devotion to country. Each sees and feels that it can best promote its
own prosperity by conciliating the good will and promoting the
prosperity of others.
The "constitutional majority," furthermore, will
work against the tendency of popular constitutional governments to
degrade into governments of the numerical majority, and thence into
absolute ones. Urging the practicality of his plan, Calhoun cites the
constitutional history of Poland over several hundred years previous
to the early eighteenth century; that of Rome in the Republican era
when the Tribune possessed the negative power over the Senate; and of
Great Britain, according to whose unwritten constitution the House of
Lords, as the "conservative power of the government," holds the
negative as between the royal, or executive, estate, and the Commons,
or popular, one. He is candid, however, in recognizing and attempting
to confront what he admits to be valid objections to the "doctrine" as
well.
Of these, by far the most grave is the problem of
identifying those interests that must be recognized in the
sense-taking, while deciding also which are to be excluded from it.
Calhoun argues that, the more advanced a society, the more complex it
becomes; while, the more complex, the more interests it encompasses.
Hence, the greater its need for the concurrent majority scheme. (Thus
the United States, as a simple merchant-agrarian society, got on well
enough for a time, despite the failure of its Constitution to allow
for the negative veto.) The problem-and it was discernible already in
Calhoun's day, to say nothing of our own-is that societies elaborate
themselves in time to the point where identifying every significant
interest, taking the sense of it, and balancing each against a
multitude of others becomes not just impractical, but impossible. In
1850, the year Calhoun died, the United States was divided sectionally
in two, with a third section, the West, developing rapidly as a
distinct geographical, social, economic, and political interest.
Today, the North is subdivided in the popular and political mind
between the Northeast, Midwest, Upper Midwest, and Northwest; the
South, between the Sunbelt and the Southwest. Similarly, in 1850, the
contending "interests" during the several decades of controversy
culminating in the War Between the States were the agricultural and
slave on the one hand, on the other the manufacturing, shipping, and
financial ones. Nowadays, however, we would have to subdivide among
these historical interests, while adding a plethora of modern ones to
the roster..Christian, post-Christian, Muslim, and atheist? Social
conservative and New Age? Environmentalist and developmentalist?
Anti-abortionist and pro-choice? Second Amendment and gun control?
Rural, urban, and suburban? Consumer and producer? Immigrant and
anti-immigrant?. Just how fine, in other words, can we afford to slice
this business of interest? In today's hyper- selfconscious, highly
organized, overly-diversified, and confirmedly activist society,
interests abound and proliferate to the extent that interest itself
becomes merely a unit of the overwhelmingly numerous numerical
majority.
Calhoun failed to suggest a solution to the
difficulty for his own age (while insisting over and again that the
conservative principle in constitutional government is compromise,
not force as it is in government of the absolute variety). What he
might have proposed for ours is anyone's guess. Surely the question is
strikingly relevant to the United States at the opening of the
twenty-first century, when the country seems evenly divided between
the Blue and Red parties, post-modernists and traditionalists,
urbanites and rural people, whites and nonwhites (an application Lani
Guinier perceived even before the 2000 election). In the decades
before the War Between the States, minority versus majority was
essentially a sectional dilemma, susceptible of resolution by the
reestablishment of the balance between the state and national
governments envisioned by the constitutional Framers-even if the
answer proved to be secession. Today, with the various contending
interests smeared across the country from top to bottom, one end to
the other, making secession a physical impossibility, what might be
described as Calhoun's "federalism within the form" seems, if
anything, more relevant to our contemporary situation than it was to
the one that obtained a century and a half ago.
However that may be, there is no denying the
prophetic truth of one of A Discourse's wisest and most
farseeing passages, in which Calhoun glimpses the
twentieth-century mass-democratic political machine in action. "The
numerical majority," he warns, ". should usually be one of the sole
elements of a constitutional democracy; but to make it the sole
element, in order to perfect the constitution and make the
government more popular [italics added], is one of the
greatest and most fatal of political errors." |
