Title: A Disquisition on Government
Description: This volume provides the most economical and textually accurate
version of Calhoun’s Disquisition available today. As a treatise, 
the Disquisition is one of the greatest and most enduring works of
American politial thought, and a text of seminal importance to all
students of American politics, history, philosophy, and law.

In the Disquisition, Calhoun believed he had laid a “solid foundation
for political science” through revitalizing popular rule. To complete
his theoretical and practical mission, Calhoun attempts to explain
the best example of the diffusion of authority and cultivation of 
liberty: the American Constitution. The fundamental law of the 
American republic provided, after all, the “interior structure” for 
regulating the shape and scope of government. As a guide for the 
states and the general government, the Constitution was also part 
of the “organism” that limited the centralization of authority and 
allowed for genuine popular rule; and it was Calhoun’s exposition 
of the connection between the moral demands of a properly constituted 
concept of popular rule and the need for practical ordering principles 
that is articulated in this book.

Calhoun presents a theory of politics that is both original and in accord 
with the mainstream of the American political tradition. More than 
any other thinker of his period, Calhoun sought to explain the enduring 
qualities of American political thought in light of the troubled world
of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike other theorists who had preceded 
and would follow Calhoun, both American and European, he did not 
seek to invent a new mode of philosophical speculation or a “grand 
theory” for the human sciences. Instead, he attempted to offer a 
refinement of classical, medieval, and modern notions regarding the
relationship between government and the social order. As an effort in 
philosophical retrenchment, the Disquisition strengthened many 
pre-existing conceptions regarding political liberty and popular rule 
within the American regime, while offering such insight with a view 
toward the future that awaited America. Calhoun’s attempt in the 
Disquisition to reconcile the good of popular rule with ethical 
requirements have singular relevance to the many nations in the 
twenty-first century now engaged, despite the ethnic animosities 
threatening their destruction, in building post-ideological, civilized 
political and social orders, especially the peoples of Central and 
Eastern Europe, Russia, and Africa.

H. Lee Cheek, Jr., is Chair of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 
Division of Brewton-Parker College in Mount Vernon, Georgia. Cheek 
is a leading Calhoun scholar and author of Calhoun and Popular Rule
and John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speechs, among his 
numerous books.
Subjects: Political science, Politics and government, United states, politics and government