Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - András Tamóc: The Politics of a Cast-Iron Man. John C. Calhoun and His Views on Government.

The fact that Calhoun was trained as a lawyer should not be overlooked. His legal education not only imparted formidable reasoning skills, but implanted a steady reverence of the Constitution. Calhoun recognized the dangers of sectional polarization and proposed a solution within the legal system. Calhoun's pessimistic conservatism was based on the work of several thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Hobbes, John Adams and Francis lieber. In the "Republic", Plato described man as a tyranny prone creature infested with greed and jealousy. He also described a dual political system warning: "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other

—you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states".

3

2 Aristotle rejected equality as a foundation of democracy and proposed a constitutional government as a buffer against tyranny.

3

3 Calhoun repudiated the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and discarded its original premise, the state of nature. Declaring "there was no such thing as a natural state where man was born equal and free"

3

4 he distinguished between the natural and political state. Since man was not born free and equal, the egalitarian natural state never existed. Man's dual nature places him in the political state where governmental interference keeps his opposing emotions under control. Calhoun's rejection of the natural state placed him a step beyond Augustine and Thomas Hobbes, both well-known critics of this idea. Augustine asserted man's capability of understanding natural laws, thus abiding by them. Human self-indulgence and moral frailty however, necessitated the development of the political state. Hobbes deemed the 3

2 Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Washington Square Press, 1926), p. 20. 3

3 Ibid., p. 89. 3

4 Kenneth M. Dolbeare, American Political Thought (New Jersey: Chatham House, 1981), p. 282. 105