Calhoun and the American Republic (Majority Rule Versus Consensus: The Political Thought of John C. Calhoun) (Book Review‪)‬

Majority Rule versus Consensus: The Political Thought of John C. Calhoun by James H. Read (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2009) Emerging from James H. Read's impressive analysis of John Calhoun's political thought is the notion that the Carolinian statesman, planter, and conservative theorist was profoundly at odds not just with the political and economic trajectory of the American republic of the second quarter of the nineteenth century but also with its very founding and the principles that undergirded it. Calhoun, in Read's telling, was a profoundly innovative, hence unconservative, thinker and statesman within the American political experience. Through his state sovereignty and concurrent majority theories, Calhoun made two basic political moves to rationalize American constitutionalism and provide for it a more secure grounding in political liberty and human flourishing, or so he believed. In this regard, Read urges that Calhoun should be considered as both a modern political theorist and statesman, given that his concurrent majority theorizing lives on in contemporary legal blueprints like the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. However, as statesman, Calhoun is less interested in recovering the original experiences of constitutional ratification than in articulating a revised founding, focusing on certain of its political qualities as a basis for building a new constitutional order.