Innovative Persuasions: Aspects of John C. Calhoun's Political Thought [antikvár]

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Some years ago, when asked by a Hungarian colleague of literary studies about the subject of my doctoral dissertation in the making, I told her John C. Calhoun, making her cjuip: "Such an obscure topic." Yet being attracted by the beauty of his system, I felt this a trifling excuse for distraction. Furthermore, obscure as he may seem in a contemporary Hungarian context, six thousand miles and more than a century from his own world, Calhoun's political theory does have relevance reaching beyond national boundaries precisely because it has intricate ties with the more general problems of the modern nation state. To a considerable extent, Calhoun's concerns were similar to those of Magyars, for instance, who, in the mid-nine-teenth century, discussed the importance of an independent nation state, trying to break free from Hapsburg rule. The analogy is, of course, not without problems: Calhoun aimed to preserve independence for the South within the Union, while a reform-minded Hungarian nobility aUied by a feeble bourgeoisie faced the task of achieving independence. Furthermore, Calhoun was painfully aware of the pitfalls of majoritarian democracy, a political system that the Revolutionaries of 1848 were only beginning to dream about. Nonetheless, what connects the cause of the Hungarian revolutionaries with that of Calhoun and the slave-holding South is the problem of diversity that they both faced. In the case of Hungary, which started a modernizing reform movement in the 18 30s aimed ultimately at abohshing feudal economic and social conditions, the progressive part of the Hungarian elite hoped to make an aUiance with the peasantry, raising them out of serfdom, into nationhood. Thus, the platform of the revolution of 1848 included the abolition of serfdom as well as privileges for the once-feudal elite. Their refusal to grant special ethnic rights to ethnic minorities such as Romanians, Croats, Serbs or Slovaks turned these groups away from and against the cause of the Magyars, largely contributing to the defeat of the revolution. Calhoun, at the same time, was preoccupied with dealing with the divisions within the white male elite, hoping to maintain a republican order and status quo. Thus, my road from studying the ideology of Hungarian nationalism in the early nineteenth century led me relatively easily to South Carolina. Calhoun's relevance became even more marked for me with the re-birth of Hungarian independence after the changes of 1989 and the eventually successful attempt to estabUsh hberal parhamentary democracy based on majoritarian rule after forty years of occupation by a foreign power. Thus, my visit to the United States as an "international exchange student" in the early 1990s, in die midst of the turbulent age of new nation states appearing on the scene came at a topical moment. I hoped to have the chance to continue investigating the beauty of Calhoun's system of political thought, fa-