Calhoun on Constitutional Government | Mises Institute

John C. Calhoun is best known as a leading American political figure in the first half of the nineteenth century who was the foremost defender of states rights and the interests of the South against the centralizers who sought to alter the Constitution from its original meaning. In A Disquisition on Government, which was published after his death in 1850, he expounds an account of the nature of government that shows great theoretical penetration, and, after studying it, one can understand why Murray Rothbard admired it. In this week’s column, I’d like to outline some of the main points of Calhoun’s account.

Calhoun begins with the “incontestable fact that man is so constituted as to be a social being.” He also says that there is another fact “not less incontestable that, while man is so constituted as to make the social state necessary to his existence and the full development of his faculties, this state cannot exist without government.” Calhoun bases this claim on the historical record, namely that large-scale societies have always had a government. Rothbardians would dissent from Calhoun’s view that government is necessary, but rather than present the Rothbardian position, which I’m sure most readers will know already, I will confine myself to an account of what Calhoun says.

If we ask Calhoun, “Why is a government necessary? Why can’t people recognize the advantages of social cooperation and form a society without a coercive agency to keep them in line?”, his answer is that human nature mandates this. People naturally are moved by what is closest to them:

. . .while man is created for the social state and is accordingly so formed as to feel what affects others as well as what affects himself, he is at the same time so constituted that his direct or individual affections are stronger than his sympathetic or social feelings.

Now a problem arises, and it is in Calhoun’s efforts to solve it that the chief theoretical merit of the Disquisition lies. The problem is that the persons in the government are subject to the same tendency to have stronger “direct affections” than social feelings. If people need a government to keep them in line, what is going to keep the government in line?

Calhoun answers that,

There is but one way in which this can possibly be done, and that is by such an organism as will furnish the ruled with the means of resisting successfully this tendency on the part of the rulers to oppression and abuse. Power can only be resisted by power,—and tendency by tendency.

But how can the ruled gain the means of resistance? It can do so only by the right to vote the government out of power:

. . .this can only be effected by or through the right of suffrage,—(the right on the part of the ruled to choose their rulers at proper intervals and to hold them thereby responsible for their conduct,). . .

Many people who defend the right of the ruled to remove the government stop at this point, but it is Calhoun’s great merit that he does not. People in a diverse society are bound to have different interests, and each group will try to vote into power a government that will be to its best advantage:

. . .the more extensive and populous the country, the more diversified the condition and pursuits of its population; and the richer, more luxurious, and dissimilar the people, the more difficult is it to equalize the government, and the more easy for one portion of the community to pervert its powers to oppress and plunder the other.

Given these conflicting interests, the divergent groups will try to form coalitions until they gain enough votes to elect a government:

For this purpose, a struggle will take place between the various interests to obtain a majority in order to control the government. If no one interest be strong enough, of itself, to obtain it, a combination will be formed between those whose interests are most alike—each conceding something to the others until a sufficient number is obtained to make a majority.

The danger people face from government is especially acute because in order to function, a government needs to tax people, but the power of taxation is liable to abuse. The people in the government are in a position to distribute money to their friends at the expense of others: 

. . .one portion of the community may be crushed, and another elevated on its ruins, by systematically perverting the power of taxation and disbursement for the purpose of aggrandizing and building up one portion of the community at the expense of the government.

Calhoun now arrives at an insight that greatly impressed Rothbard. If the government taxes some people while giving money to others, then money is ultimately being distributed from the former group to the latter. If someone gets more in benefits than he pays in taxes, he is a tax consumer. In effect, he pays no taxes. The opposite is true for those who pay more in taxes than they gain in benefits. They are the taxpayers; and one can view the whole process of taxation and disbursement as creating classes of exploiting and exploiting people:

The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.

The Disquisition now approaches its theoretical climax. According to Calhoun, society needs a government, but those in government will inevitably exploit the ruled. The right to suffrage will lead to more exploitation. What, if anything, can be done? Calhoun brilliantly suggests that the best course of action is what he calls the concurrent majority. Every interest group in society must be able to block measures of the government that go against its interests:

It results. . .that there are two different modes in which the sense of the community may be taken; one, simply by the right of suffrage, unaided; the other, by the right through a proper organism. Each collects the sense of the majority. But one regards numbers only. . .the other, on the contrary, regards interests as well as numbers;—considering the community as made up of different and conflicting interests, as far as the action of the government is concerned—and takes the sense of each through its majority or appropriate organ, and he united sense of all as the sense of the entire community. The former of these I shall call the numerical or absolute majority, and the latter, the concurrent or constitutional majority.

If every group must agree, won’t this necessarily result in paralysis? Won’t some group almost certainly veto any proposed course of action? Calhoun denies this. He argues that if people realize that they have to agree in order to reach a decision, and if they also want to have a government, there will be a process of mutual adjustment. They will compromise on a solution that each thinks the best that can be attained under the circumstances: “Such is the imperious character of the necessity which impels to compromise under governments of this description.”  By contrast, absolute majority leads to the imposition of the will of the majority by force on the recalcitrant.

The thoughts expressed in the Disquisition guided Calhoun in his defense of constitutional government in the United States. People who wanted a stronger central government proposed to interpret the Constitution in a way that violated the original understanding of it as a compact among the people of the several states. In the American context, the states were the concurrent majority that Northern ideologists aimed to set aside. Their efforts to do so culminated in the War between the States, with all its horrors.