Abstract
This chapter analyzes the contribution of John C Calhoun to the decentralist philosophy. John C. Calhoun is probably the most original and penetrating thinker of the early American liberalism. He saw clearly the two major problems of constitutional design and protection of liberty and offered solutions for them; first, any constitutional limitations of central government are worthless if not followed up by a real, political, and territorial checks and balances. The second is rejection of the Lockean and Hobbesian social contract framework of a unified body politic represented by a sovereign central government, tied to the individual directly by social contract. Calhoun rehabilitates society as an intermediary force between the central government and individuals, by interjecting state governments and local factions as constitutional political actors. In clear contradiction to all modern theories of democracy and social choice, Calhoun argues that it is not the quantitative, but rather the qualitative or “concurrent” majority that counts in terms of real representation and democracy, which are primarily focused on protecting community powers of self-government. The chapter concludes that Calhoun both clearly formulated an attractive alternative to majoritarianism and reconciled the compact theory with nationalism, by making it a national decision-making mechanism.
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Notes
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In a certain sense, the entire Calhounian project could be regarded as a restatement or Lockean philosophical tradition.
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One can argue that so long as the Northern states allowed those in the South to use slavery to subsidize Southern economic elites’ costs of production, this tariff-based advantage was offset by the savings afforded by slavery. However, the problem with this argument that there were no cost savings from slavery because slavery was both a system of production and a welfare state: Slaveholders not only economically exploited slaves by not paying them for their work, they also fed, clothed, provided housing and medical care as well old age care for their slaves, free of charge. Plantation system was both economic exploitation and a system of social security from “cradle to grave” (which at that time in the Northern system of free labor did not exist at all). Calculations by “clio-metricians” show that close to 95% of revenue from plantation production was used to cover the needs of slave workforce (Fogell and Engerman 1995).
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On the lack of any political theory in Marx, see Popper (1971).
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For a wide-ranging discussion of the arguments for and against Calhoun being a legitimate heir of anti-federalists, see Cornel (1999).
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It is obvious that in the context of the slaveholding South, most of black people were excluded from the concept of socially relevant “groups”; however, this is not a peculiarity of the South in the 1840s or 1850s or of Calhoun’s constitutional scheme; black slaves were excluded automatically from any political regime in antebellum America from the very beginning, and even free blacks were often denied basic civil rights, let alone political rights, in the South and in the North. When Madison wrote about “factions” and how to control them in Federalist 10 in 1788 he equally excluded black slaves from the concept of “faction,” but we don’t question his analysis of how the factions are dealt with in a large republic by pointing out that he excluded black slaves.
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This Calhoun’s insight is essentially confirmed by modern theories of “minimum winning coalitions,” see Riker (1962).
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Following Jeffersonian and Jacksonian traditions, Calhoun by “organized interests” conspiring with the government means primarily industrial and manufacturing interests profiting from protective tariffs, corporations benefiting from government subsidies (such as railroads) and private banks.
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For an elaborate critique of democracy as majority rule from this point of view, see Hoppe (2001).
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Compare here the discussion in Chapter 4 of the similarities between Locke and Hobbes with regard to their unitary concept of the state.
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The term “invisible hand” is here used in the sense James Buchanan used it when he said that there was not “political equivalent” of the invisible hand of Adam Smith, meaning that mere competition among various elites for political power will not produce rational allocation of political costs and benefits (spending and taxation), i.e., that societies need Constitutions to rationalize politics. Calhoun’s theory arguably provides an element of “internal” rationalization that allows us to rely much more on spontaneous competition of the various groups, because the logic of the system makes predatory and exploitative behavior difficult to sustain.
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A deep antipathy to democracy connects such diverse classical liberal thinkers as Adam Smith (himself a monarchist), David Hume, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and F.A. Hayek. Calhoun seems to be an exception to this trend, in his iconoclastic belief that only that (some form of) democracy could be harmless but also the method for limiting the power of government.
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The concept of “decentralized democracy” here is used as opposed to the standard liberal notion of a Constitution as a set of rules, formal or informal, specifying what the government is allowed and is not allowed to do with regard to the individual. Calhoun departs from this basic tenet of liberal constitutionalism by putting the preexisting groups, territorially organized, between the government and the individual, and giving them superior power vis-a-vis the government. The noun “democracy” is used as a critical category, because Calhoun believes pluralist societal groups can check the government, and considers this a deepening of the concept of a “numerical majoritarianism.” Most of other liberals don’t believe that individual liberty can be protected by any kind of deepening or adjusting of the principle of democracy.
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It is possible to argue that local political elites could be equally oppressive as the central ones, but this is ameliorated by the fact that they need the concurrence of other elites for almost every decision; thereby the room of exercising their designs narrows down. Additionally, the more the republic is decentralized, the more effective choice its citizens have in voting with their feet, or changing one local community for another (see, Chapter 7).
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Jankovic, I. (2019). The Last Stand: John C. Calhoun. In: The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03733-8_10
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