Scholars of American political thought have often dismissed John C. Calhoun as a mere apologist for slavery and secession. Calhoun specialists have focused on his storied political career or on his theory of the concurrent majority as a way of protecting minority rights. James H. Read makes his contribution to the scholarship of Calhoun by insisting that Calhoun's defense of minority rights and his defense of slavery are closely linked. Read ultimately finds Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority to be unjust. However, Read's careful reflections on the imperfections of majority rule prove rewarding to the scholar.

Read presents Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority with remarkable evenhandedness. Calhoun developed his critique of democratic majority rule in response to the threat that Northern sectionalism posed to the South, first though a prohibitive tariff policy, and then through the rise of abolitionism. Calhoun proposed that the regime should operate on the basis of consensus for the common good. During the nullification crisis of 1832–33, Calhoun proposed that each state would have the power to nullify the federal tariff when it exceeded this constitutional requirement of consensus. By the 1840s, when the debate shifted to the presence of slavery in the federal territories, Calhoun proposed a dual executive to preserve Southern interests.

Calhoun's willingness to challenge key elements of the Founding has garnered for him the suspicion of heterodoxy from scholars. Calhoun rejected natural rights as the foundation of liberty, yet Read's careful exegesis of Calhoun situates him as operating in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian republicanism. Calhoun's critique of the federal tariff as promoting corruption echoed Jefferson's own critique of the national bank in the 1790s. Where Calhoun went beyond the Founders, in ignoring the nationalist voices while reading his axioms of state sovereignty and slavery into the Founding compromise, Read recaptures the subtlety of Calhoun's thought while reminding the reader that Calhoun was, in fact, reinventing history. Calhoun simplified the complex compromises that the Founders had built into the constitutional settlement of 1787. Read identifies two key a priori assumptions that Calhoun used to interpret the Constitution: that the states alone were sovereign and that slavery was a positive good.

Calhoun's reputation has been most tarnished by his association with slavery, so it is not surprising that scholars who have seriously studied his thought (Clyde Wilson and Lee Cheek, for instance) have sought to defend Calhoun's reputation by separating his political theory of a concurrent majority from the historical accident of slavery in the society he happened to inhabit. Read explains that this cannot be done. He contends, “Calhoun believed that American slavery was just and that all efforts to abolish it were dangerously evil” (118). Calhoun insisted that slavery was permanent. Further, slavery gave white men the means and independence that made their liberty possible. It enabled a white concurrent majority to function within South Carolina by harmonizing planters and yeomen across class lines. The diverse interests of the upcountry and lowcountry were induced to compromise because they faced the threat of abolition or slave revolt. Calhoun believed this logic could apply to the entire nation. Slavery provided the export base to sustain the Northern economic elite. Northern statesmen, insisted Calhoun, also had a duty to promote slavery as the common good for the entire nation.

The primacy which slavery held in Calhoun's thought led him to expand the power of the Federal government to protect slavery. During the 1830s, South Carolina had a direct role in collecting the tariff and could nullify the federal laws and prevent its enforcement. A decade later, when Northern states opposed slavery, they focused their energies on prohibiting the spread of slavery in federal territories. Nullification was powerless to oppose this. In response, Calhoun articulated the theory that the government was bound to promote “increased stability and security to the domestic institutions of the states,” meaning slavery (101). It was, for Calhoun, “a higher principle than state rights,” one in which the South held the moral high ground and would not yield (106). Calhoun understood the nation to be the proactive instrument of sovereign states, more limited by the spirit of the consensus on slavery that he imagined than by constitutional texts.

Read's analysis of slavery (74–159) is wide ranging, touching on Calhoun's theory of slavery vis-à-vis foreign policy, Native Americans, the Bible, the census, the Industrial Revolution, class consciousness, and Lockean liberalism. Read's effort to contextualize Calhoun's thought on slavery is largely successful. It is, indeed, anachronistic to view Calhoun as anything other than an apologist for slavery. Yet Read's treatment of Calhoun does not fully develop the powerful counterarguments that Calhoun's contemporaries deployed. For instance, Read insists that “in 1850, the year Calhoun died, there was no obvious worldwide momentum in favor of universal liberty and equality” (156). To be sure, democracy and human equality were not fully self-evident propositions, but by 1850, the momentum had decisively shifted. Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was being successfully suppressed, and Northern Whigs and Free Soil Democrats were developing the line of reasoning which Abraham Lincoln would deploy so successfully in his 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas. This element is missing from Read's analysis. While Calhoun's defense of slavery leads Read to condemn the concurrent majority system as unjust, he suggests that Calhoun's “contradictions on liberty, considered as a mirror on America and the modern world, are perhaps more valuable than anything else he said or did” (158). Read here implies that Calhoun, and not Lincoln, spoke the truth about the American regime.

While Read's argument focuses heavily on the influence of slavery within Calhoun's thought, he nonetheless takes Calhoun's arguments for consensus seriously before offering a defense of democratic majoritarianism. Read levels three different critiques at Calhoun's consensus theory: that the minority veto would lead to anarchy, that majority rule would be effectively replaced by minority rule, and that the minority veto in practice excludes some minorities (like slaves) whose interests are not deemed significant. Thus, Read condemns Calhoun's theory not as irrelevant, but as illiberal and impractical. The concurrent majority depended upon the injustice of slavery and the statesmanship of an aristocratic planter class.

Calhoun's continuing importance in the field of democratic theory is compellingly illustrated in the final chapter. Read explains how Calhoun's theory illuminates the Good Friday accords for Northern Ireland, the failed Yugoslavian state, the constitutional reconstruction of South Africa amidst the collapse of apartheid, and the work on behalf of minority rights by legal scholar Lani Guinier. These attempts to restrain majority rule simultaneously demonstrate the significance of Calhoun's thought and the difficulty of implementing it. In relating Calhoun to contemporary politics, Read urges scholars to take democracy's critics seriously. Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority, despite the taint of slavery, gives scholars a starting point to reflect on the imperfections of democracy.