ABSTRACT
Should we read Calhoun? It is sometimes maintained that there can be no gain in studying the ideas of John C. Calhoun. It is argued that Calhoun’s cause – the cause of the South – was crushingly defeated in the American Civil War, and that therefore there is little point in giving serious attention to the ideology that sustained it. ‘World history is the world’s court of justice’, and Calhoun’s teaching has been roundly condemned by that court. Why, then, should one unearth it? Another objection, which leads on from the first, is that the cause that Calhoun defended embraced and included that of slavery, and slavery is not a cause that anyone in the civilised world now dreams of defending. Once again history has spoken, in this case the evolution of humanity, and this makes it doubly unnecessary to take Calhoun’s ideas seriously. A final objection – which is perhaps better described as an instinctive reaction or suspicion, rather than a reasoned argument – is that in treating Calhoun as a profound thinker about politics, one is casting doubt on the vision of American history as a steady unfolding of light and reason in the world, a vision that is closely bound up with American self-consciousness. One is, so to speak, obscuring the message that America gives to the world. There is something in all these objections. However, the assumption that underlies them, which is that history is a linear progression of might and right, and only this linear progression is worthy of study, means that historical understanding is necessarily stunted, and that its lessons may not be learnt. Tensions, oppositions and collisions are patently an inherent part of the dynamics of history, and not mere accidents, or minor appendages, of an inexorable movement. Wars do indeed settle things, and no one would dream of saying after 1865 Calhoun’s alternative for the South, and for the Union, should have been revived and asserted once more. But wars, and in particular civil wars, are also expressions of a deep tension within a society or polity, a tension which cannot be resolved by normal legislative methods, or rational deliberation, or by the decision of an external arbiter. They are a response to a disjunction or contradiction in society, a statement that smooth linear progression is not, or no longer possible. They are furthermore a method of settlement which has its own
dynamic, taking the initial antagonism on to a new level, and creating a world at the end that not even the eventual victor had envisaged at the outset. Only by viewing history in a way that gives full weight to the friction, the opposition, and the build up of contradictions, as well as to the dynamic of war itself, can one properly or fully understand it. This is another way of saying – without any Marxist over-or under-tones – that one must understand it as a dialectical process. The American Civil War was an intense four-year struggle of huge geographical extent, in which approximately one million people died. It was not a mere interruption, but a very real break and re-assemblage of American unity on a new, or at least a fundamentally renovated, basis. One cannot conceive of a struggle being conducted on such a scale, and with such intensity unless each side had a profound conviction that their cause was right and just. The incompatibility between slave-holding and free-labour societies within the Union, and the ever-renewing friction between them, undoubtedly provided the underlying antagonism behind the war, but it was the right to secede from the Union claimed by the South, and the right forcibly to oppose that secession – to treat it as rebellion – claimed by the North, that finally transformed the antagonism into war. These rights were each claimed by appeal to the structure and purpose of the United States of America as a political entity, or, put more simply, to the nature of the federal Union that had been created in 1787. It was only in the course of the war, and under the pressure of war, that the abolition of slavery became a war-aim of the North. For these reasons students of American federalism and of federalism in general, cannot ignore the Civil War, as if it were a regrettable accident. It has somehow to be integrated into their conceptualisation of federalism, and this is difficult, if not impossible to do, without coming to grips with the most coherent and comprehensive statement of the rights of the South, that made by Calhoun. Calhoun’s rigorously analytical manner of thought sheds light not only on the original structure of the American federal system, and on its dynamics from 1789 to 1850, but also on the interaction between federalism and democracy. His philosophical turn of mind links the particular issues at stake in the conflict between North and South with perennial issues of political power and liberty. There is no need to claim for Calhoun a monopoly of the truth, or to agree with his endorsement of slavery, in order to acknowledge his profound contribution to our historical and theoretical understanding.
