Calhoun and Hobbes:
Just What Is Conservative Thought?
What are the core concepts of conservative political thought? Are there certain first principles that inevitably lead to conservative conclusions? Or is conservative political thought simply whatever serves the current ruling class?
I’ve been thinking about this ever since I learned that Karl Popper founded the free market think tank the Mount Pelerin Society alongside the conservative economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises. In his The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper spends the first half of the book attacking Plato’s Republic. Hayek and Friedman both taught at the University of Chicago alongside Leo Strauss—where all three directly trained or influenced many notable Reagan and Bush era neoconservatives. Strauss drew heavily from Plato’s Republic, adopting the ‘noble lie’ and ‘rule of the wise’ into his political philosophy. It struck me as strange that Popper and Strauss could work effectively in the same political and economic circles, yet arrive there through such different philosophical trajectories.
Maybe there’s not much to conservative political thought beyond conservatism? Consider John C. Calhoun and Thomas Hobbes, another two quintessentially conservative thinkers whose political theories are almost completely different.
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher born in 1588. His mother went into labor with him while the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel. Hobbes lived into his nineties, and chaos and war continued to unfold all around him. The Thirty Years’ War tore across Europe, and then the English Civil Wars resulted in King Charles losing his head and Oliver Cromwell coming to power. At the height of the Civil Wars, Hobbes fled to France, where he tutored the future King Charles II in mathematics and wrote Leviathan, arguably the most influential work of political philosophy ever written in the English language.
Hobbes, living through extreme violence and unrest, tries to find ways to maintain political stability. He imagines humans before political systems came to be, living as individuals in a “state of nature.” Hobbes argues that “notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where there is no law, no injustice.”[1] Without legal impediments, everything is permitted and no one is safe. And so, everyone chooses to leave the state of nature and make a covenant with one another to have a sovereign—whether king or committee—whom they will all obey. And when that sovereign power makes a law, “no law can be unjust.”[2]
The English Civil Wars had started when King Charles and Parliament clashed over taxation and political authority. As Hobbes writes, “If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war.”[3] Whatever form the sovereign takes, according to Hobbes, it must be a single, undifferentiated power. Dividing power destroys it.
Two centuries later and an ocean away, John C. Calhoun was a U.S. politician from South Carolina with intense eyes and a massive intellect. Sadly, he used his powerful mind to argue on behalf of slavery, slaveholders, and “natural” hierarchies. Calhoun rejected social contract theory’s “state of nature.” People have always been social beings, so society has existed as long as people have. No such “state of nature” ever existed, so why use it to explain why we are the way we are? While that argument makes sense, as a slavery enthusiast, Calhoun also adds that people are not naturally equal, and we only have the rights society gives us, so contracting as free and equal individuals from outside society makes no sense.
Calhoun also thinks different groups and interests should share and balance political power. He makes a distinction between constitutional governments based on the “numerical majority” and those using the “concurrent majority.” The numerical majority is simple majority rule. More people vote for one person or faction, that person or faction gains power, and groups in the numerical minorities get left out of political decision making.
Calhoun prefers the concurrent majority. It “regards interests as well as numbers—considering the community as made up of different and conflicting interests, as far as the action of the government is concerned—and takes the sense of each through its majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all as the sense of the entire community.”[4] Different regions and industries receive a voice in the government and veto powers against one another, so that no single section or interest can dominate the others. In his political life, Calhoun applied this principle to argue that South Carolina could nullify a federal tariff that aided northern manufacturing and hurt southern slaveholders.
Calhoun wrote from a southern slaveholding perspective at a time when the non-slaveholding north was experiencing a population boom and farmers too poor to own people were moving west into the new territories. Slaveholders were becoming numerically and geographically isolated. Calhoun’s concurrent majority was designed to serve slaveholder interests, not dissenters, and certainly not ethnic minorities. As Richard Hofstadter writes in his chapter on Calhoun, “He was not interested in any minority that was not a propertied minority. The concurrent majority itself was a device without relevance to the protection of dissent, but designed specifically to protect a vested interest of considerable power.”[5]
Calhoun and Hobbes were both deeply conservative men devoted to a stable status quo and obedience to authority. But they did so on different continents in different centuries, and the paths they saw toward stability were remarkably different. Hobbes argued that we all agreed to obey from an imagined state of equality, so please quit complaining and get back to obeying. Calhoun thought that natural equality is a myth and what really matters is that different leaders from different groups should work together so they can all stay powerful and everything can remain as it is.
These two conservative thinkers could hardly agree less. Considering Calhoun and Hobbes, as well as Popper and Strauss: What exactly is conservative political thought? What are its first principles? Are there any? Or is it as simple as, “Respect power and authority. Make sure the people in power stay there.”?
It seems like there might not be an ideological through-line any more complicated than that. This is why pointing out contradictions in conservative thought generally won’t slow them down or make them rethink their actions. The U.S. Republican Party is supposed to be the party of small government, yet it keeps increasing federal power and spends and spends and spends. An antiwar candidate becomes a prowar president. These are complete contradictions, but pointing them out will probably never have a practical application.
Hobbes feared civil war and political instability. Calhoun was scared to lose the race-based hierarchy that made his family wealthy and powerful. They were driven to their conclusions through fear and emotion. They may have believed that they reasoned dispassionately and carefully using facts and logic, but there was a highly emotional fear and distrust of other humans that set them on their philosophical trajectories. There is a moral bankruptcy at the core of conservative thinking that gets covered up with whatever arguments make sense in the moment.
Conservative politics is about maintaining power and authority. There is no real philosophical core. We don’t need to unravel their ideologies or uncover their contradictions. We just need to stop them.
[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651: Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1996), 85, Head Edition 63.
[2] Ibid., 230, Head 182.
[3] Ibid., 121, Head 93.
[4] John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 23.
[5] Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948: New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 116.