The Tyranny of the Majority by Tamás Nyirkos

Author:Tamás Nyirkos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351211406
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

As everyone knows, Calhoun tried to protect the minority of slaveholder states against the majority of the Union. This may not make him popular today, although his clear insights, if taken seriously, can also undermine any form of oppression by a majority, including that of racial minorities. (As Donald Beahm observed, Lani Guinier’s struggle against the racial inequalities of the American political system in the 1990s rested on strikingly similar principles as Calhoun’s. Beahm 2002: 7–8.) The main error, or maybe intentional deception is “to confound the numerical majority with the people; and this so completely as to regard them as identical” (Calhoun 1851: 29). In ancient and medieval societies, this move may have been made in good faith – although it was not unproblematic even then – but in modern societies the diversity of social groups, interests, and opinions renders any such unifying effort unjustified. To assess the threat in its real magnitude it is sufficient to remind ourselves that in a state based on popular sovereignty the identification of the majority with the whole gives literally absolute power to the latter: “all the rights, powers, and immunities of the whole people come to be attributed to the numerical majority; and, among others, the supreme, sovereign authority of establishing and abolishing governments at pleasure” (Calhoun 1851: 30). The definition of sovereignty as decision on the exception is very Schmittian; the solution much less. The division of the category of majority into “numerical” and “concurrent” majorities, and naming the letter as the desirable, “constitutional” one only replaces the earlier formula of minority veto which John Adams so fiercely rejected. Calhoun even goes so far as to defend the liberum veto of seventeenth to eighteenth century Poland (which, pace Adams, functioned for almost 200 years) and cites similar examples from American history, perhaps most strikingly from the practice of native American tribal confederations (Calhoun 1851: 71–73). The essence of the veto is, of course, not to obstruct the normal course of legislation, but to give underrepresented or regularly discriminated minorities an ultima ratio against the abuse of majority power. In this sense, not only Lani Guinier will return to this idea in the twentieth century, but also in some respect John Rawls.

Although John Calhoun began his political and literary career in the early 1800s, and was vice-president of the United States when Tocqueville arrived to the country, his main work, A Disquisition of Government was only published posthumously in 1851. He thus may have influenced the French author just as much as he was influenced by him.

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