The Essential Calhoun

John C. Calhoun was a major actor in the political history of nineteenth-century America. His dramatic career will always be of interest. However, Calhoun is equally important as a political thinker who continues to elicit widespread interest from the most diverse points of the ideological spectrum. The Essential Calhoun is designed to present a full-fledged selection of speeches and writings taken from the entire forty-year span of his public career and from many varieties of occasions, public and private. For the first time, it is possible to appreciate Calhoun fully and to seriously examine his thought within the compass of a single volume. Calhoun is known to posterity as the premier defender of the Old South and slavery and as the theorist of the concurrent majority. His contemporaries knew him as much else, including a political economist and foreign policy authority. As the range of writings shows, he was a valuable and often prophetic commentator who remains as timely as the Budget Crisis of 1990 and the Gulf War. Calhoun's thought testifies to a deep and abiding concern with moral and ethical issues that confront a government resting on the consent of the people. The fundamental question with which he wrestles in all his works is how to achieve and maintain a proper balance between power and liberty in a democratic society. By providing the most representative compendium of his thought, The Essential Calhoun invites the reader to engage in this exercise of applying the moral imagination realistically to the public business in America. Historians, American studies specialists, economists, and political scientists will find this volume indispensable.

Library Journal

Calhoun was one of the giants of 19th-century American history. In the years prior to the Civil War, he served as both a theorist and an active politician on behalf of states rights and as a foreign policy expert in Washington. Conservatives, particularly those with a libertarian bent, have long lauded Calhoun for his political philosophy, elucidated in speeches, letters, and thousands of published documents. Editor Wilson, who also serves as editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Univ. of South Carolina Pr., ten volumes, 20 projected), here has taken what he considers the most vital of Calhoun's massive production and presented it in a single volume. For those who care only for Calhoun's political philosophy stripped of its historical context or those who know his life and times extremely well, this collection may be useful. However, Wilson provides virtually no historic context for the documents. There are no footnotes to explain references within the text. The result is a disappointing historic edition of the best of Calhoun.-- Charles K. Piehl, Mankato State Univ., Minn.