John C. Calhoun has been so closely associated with the defense of southern rights—including the right to hold slaves—that his political thought has seldom received an impartial examination. In a wide-ranging study, James H. Read makes a noteworthy contribution toward that end, avoiding the tendency either to play down Calhoun's defense of slavery or to reduce his political theory to an elaborate rationale for it. The title of Read's work indicates that he is principally concerned with Calhoun's posthumously published Disquisition on Government, in which Calhoun presents his critique of majoritarian democracy (government of the “numerical majority”) and his alternative in the form of government by the “concurrent majority.”

Read does not, however, give a systematic exposition of the Disquisition or its much longer (but less important) companion, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (he shows that the basic idea of Calhoun's argument in the Disquisition was arrived at before the constitutional theory of the Discourse). His chapters are thematic in nature and reference a variety of sources, both primary and secondary. The final substantive chapter of the book is largely concerned with the version of Calhoun's theory put forward in recent decades by Arend Lijphart (“consociational democracy”). In the same chapter Read takes up the proposals, which are Calhounian in spirit, of Lani Guanier's The Tyranny of the Majority (1994).

The breadth of Read's treatment is testimony to the many avenues by which Calhoun's work can be approached. He considers the Carolinian's modification of the constitutional theories of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (Chap. 2); his views on political economy, especially in connection with the tariff question (Chap. 3); his theory of the Union (Chap. 4); his defense of slavery (Chap. 5); his argument for government by consensus (Chap. 6); and the actual or proposed application of Calhounian ideas to deeply divided societies outside the United States—Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and South Africa—and to America's own racial divide (Chap. 7).

The principal argument of the book—highlighted in the introductory and concluding chapters, as well as in the title—is given in Chapters 6 and 7. Building on the earlier chapters, Read argues that the minority veto/consensus model of government (as he calls it) is seldom, if ever, a superior alternative to majoritarian democracy. The circumstances that would plausibly justify such a model are rare. They did not exist in South Africa, where a minority veto provision was considered for the country's post-apartheid constitution but ultimately rejected. Nor did they exist in Yugoslavia, where a consensus requirement among the republics failed to prevent secession and civil war. (Northern Ireland presents a more favorable but less conclusive example.) Although Calhoun cast his argument for the concurrent-majority principle in general terms in the Disquisition, he evidently wrote with the American South in mind. There, a common interest (or perceived interest) in maintaining slavery solved the troublesome question of which minorities are to have vetoes. All southern whites, Calhoun asserted in a speech to the Senate in 1848 (quoted on p. 145), “belong to the upper class,” whether they own slaves or not. The slaveholding states showed a sufficient degree of internal homogeneity (slaves excepted) to avoid the application of Calhoun's principle to their own minorities.

As the examples of Lijphart and Guanier demonstrate, the consensus model of government can be evaluated independently of Calhoun's views on slavery. Read declines to do so, in part because (as noted) it was the conditions that slavery produced in the South that made Calhoun's proposals arguably practicable there. But Read devotes much more attention to slavery than is necessary to establish this point. Why he does so is not altogether clear. Chapter 5 unsurprisingly concludes by dismissing the value of Calhoun's defense of slavery, “considered as straight political theory.” But this dismissal is followed immediately by the paradoxical judgment that Calhoun's “contradictions on liberty”—that the liberty of some is dependent on the denial of liberty to others—“considered as a mirror on America and the modern world, are perhaps more valuable than anything else he said or did” (p. 159).

Because Calhoun rejected natural rights as a viable foundation for free governments in the Disquisition, he offered a different foundation in the form of a theory of human progress: Progress depends on the freedom of individuals to pursue their self-interest, though progress is retarded by extending freedom to those who are unprepared for exercising it. As Read points out, the implicit liberalism of this aspect of Calhoun's theory is difficult to reconcile with a commitment to slavery as a permanent institution in the United States (that Calhoun was so committed is not doubtful). Besides the intriguing but undeveloped suggestion that freedom somehow involves a “zero-sum logic” (pp. 157–58), Read argues that Calhoun must have believed in a racial hierarchy according to which liberal principles are simply inefficacious for blacks.

The problem with Read's argument here is not that it is unpersuasive or unimportant. The argument is well made and has obvious historical and biographical importance. The problem, rather, is one of relevance for a study of this kind. If the theory of the Disquisition can be made consistent with slavery only by the application of what Read calls an “ideological patch” (p. 138), that will hardly appear to most readers today as a defect in the theory. What, then, are political theorists to learn from Calhoun's inconsistency in this regard? More broadly, what of theoretical interest can be learned from studying those on the wrong side of the slavery question?

The obvious answer is that those who were wrong about slavery can be right about many other things. No doubt Read would concede this possibility in Calhoun's case (though it is harder to make such a concession in view of his treatment of Calhoun's views on slavery in Chapter 5 and elsewhere). The truth appears to be more complicated. Calhoun's defense of the institution as a “positive good” implies that if he had had the power to go back in time and prevent the introduction of slaves into North America, he would not have done so. Can that be true? More plausibly, Calhoun's reference (in an 1838 speech that Read quotes on pp. 123–24) to a “mysterious Providence” that brought Europeans and Africans together in the southern states suggests that he began from the existing fact of slavery there, not from a theoretical conclusion in favor of slavery.

If my inference is correct, then the question that Calhoun's career presents is less a question of theory in the strictest sense than that of statesmanship. Calhoun was forced to deal with a well-established and profitable institution that, at least in some measure, contradicted his own principles. It is the same problem that confronted other politicians of the time, those of the North as well as the South. Regrettably, the author does not pursue this line of inquiry.

Still, Read's conclusion deserves to be emphasized: The shortcomings of majority rule are largely those of democracy itself. The bad effects of those shortcomings can be mitigated somewhat by constitutional means, but in the end there is no substitute for prudence and moderation on the part of political leaders and those who elect them.