Télécharger Côte-d'Or Magazine N°111 - Avril / Mai 2011 en PDF

Russell Kirk: The Conservative Mindtaxes and those who receive the benefits, then that government is a tyranny, no matter howegalitarian in theory. “And so,” Kirk writes, “Calhoun comes to the doctrine of concurrentmajorities, his most important single contribution to political thought.” 44 A truemajority, by Calhoun’s understanding, is not a number of people told by a headcount;instead, it is a balancing and compromising of different interests, in which all the importantaspects of the population are represented. Kirk quotes Calhoun,There are two different modes in which the sense of the community may betaken; one, simply by the right of suffrage, unaided; the other, by the rightthrough a proper organism. Each collects the sense of the majority. Butone regards numbers only, and considers the whole community as a unit,having but one common interest throughout; and collects the sense of thegreater number of the whole, as that of the community. The other, on thecontrary, regards interests as well as numbers—considering the communityas made up of different and conflicting interests, as far as the action ofthe government is concerned; and takes the sense of each, through itsmajority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all, as the sense ofthe entire community. The former of these I shall call the numerical, orabsolute majority; and the latter, the concurrent, or constitutional majority.45The great breakthrough Calhoun made with this new doctrine is the rejection ofthe abstraction called “the people.” There is no such thing as a “people,” existing as ahomogeneous body of identical interests. In reality, there are only individuals and groups.Polling the numerical majority is unlikely to determine the sense of the true majority ofinterests and will probably result in granting all power to the urban concentrations of population,effectively disenfranchising the rural areas. For Calhoun, of course, the goodSoutherner that he was, this would never do. Votes ought to be weighed as well as counted,he thought, and not merely the individual votes of persons, but also the wills of thelarge groups of the nation, groups defined by their economic or geographical characteristicsand protected from encroachment of one another by a check on the action of government.Calhoun believed common convenience would prevent such an arrangement fromresulting in a perpetual stalemate, though even if such reorganization did slow the pace ofgovernment action, the gain in security from oppression would be worth it.Calhoun further examined how such a government would affect liberty. Under theconcurrent majority principle, he found that liberty would increase relative to the absolutemajority system because each region or section of the populace would be free to shape itsAlabama Policy Institute-22-