Secession

This might be worth chewing over next semester when we discuss federalism. Secession continues to be on the minds of some.

From Edward Tenner:

. . . Breaking up is on the minds of some Americans, too, and not only the Alaskans we read about during the 2008 campaign. The Chronicle of Higher Education has just spotlighted a less familiar society of academic Southern traditionalists. The 64-member Abbeville Institute, founded in 2003 by the Emory University philosophy professor Donald W. Livingston and named for the original home of the statesman and political theorist John C. Calhoun, is about to hold a public conference on two of Calhoun's own themes, secession and nullification. And the speaker list leaves little doubt about what side they're on.

Among the speakers are the professed neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale and the emeritus economics professor Thomas Naylor, advocates of the Second Vermont Republic, a movement admiring the New England secessionism of the early nineteenth century.

The Vermont separatists don't tell the full story of New England intellectuals and secession. Take Yale President Timothy Dwight, John C. Calhoun's mentor. The Web site Yale, Slavery & Abolition quotes him on separation (and justifying slavery):

The evils of disunion would be so great, that nothing like an advantage which appears to be promised by it, is worthy of a moment's regard. Dissolution would involve so many calamities, that it would be childish to weigh it against a few questions of local interest, which are as nothing when put in contrast to it.

And Abbeville's hero, Calhoun himself, began his political life as a nationalist, and turned to nullification and secession ideas only beginning in the late 1820s.The Abbeville conference still is a good thing, because it focuses attention on a growing and--on balance--disturbing trend. But the issue is a complex one involving environment and security issues as well as political theory; look especially at the map on the Georgia-South Ossetia conflict. Secession is too important a subject to be left to the secessionists.

On Reconciliation

A primer on the reconciliation process.

Update -- 12/18/09

I didn't mean to take a month off, but I did anyway. The end of the semester always gets hectic and I unfortunately let the blog slip.

I plan on making minor modifications to the site prior to the start of the spring semester, and I want to integrate it a bit better with the material on the class wiki.

I've let a few major events slip by without comment or an effort to tie it into our subject matter. I'll step back and correct both.

Comments and helpful suggestions are always welcome.