EIGHTH ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE SCHOLARS'
CONFERENCE
STATE
NULLIFICATION, SECESSION, AND THE HUMAN SCALE OF POLITICAL
ORDER
February 4-7, 2010
Francis Marion Hotel, Charleston, South Carolina
TOPIC:
George
Kennan, author of the Cold War policy to contain the Soviet
Union and described by some as the conscience
of America,
taught that a regime can become dysfunctional by simply becoming
too large. Near the end of his long career in service
to his country, where he stood for moderation and realism
in international politics, he judged that the American regime
had grown too large for the purposes of self government and
that we should begin a public debate on how to divide it in
the direction of a more human scale.
Many
Americans today feel in their bones the truth of Kennan's
insight. For the first time in 144 years the topics of State
nullification and secession have again entered public discourse.
Nullification and secession were understood by the Founders
as remedies to unconstitutional acts of the central government.
Yet over a century of nationalist indoctrination and policy
has largely hidden this inheritance from public scrutiny.
The aim of the conference is to recover an understanding of
that part of the American tradition and to explore its intimations
for today.
- How
did the central government to which were delegated only
enumerated powers break free from what Jefferson called
the
chains of the Constitution?
- How did (and does) financial centralization lead to political centralization?
- Are State nullification and secession constitutional?
- Fifteen states peacefully seceded from the Soviet Union, the most centralized regime in history. How did they do it?
- Learn about The Second Vermont Republic, a serious secession movement in Vermont, and why thinkers as diverse as George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Walter Williams have supported it.
- Are Aristotle and Kennan right that there is a human scale to political order? If so, how big is too big?
SPEAKERS:
Kent Masterson Brown, Historian and Constitutional Lawyer
"An
Indissoluble Union: The Ultimate Nonsequitur"
Marshall DeRosa, Prof. of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University
"States'
Rights versus National Wrongs: The Tenth Amendment
Awakening, the Supreme Court be Damned"
Thomas DiLorenzo, Prof. of Economics, Loyola University, Maryland
"The
Founding Fathers of Constitutional Subversion"
Peter Jones, Former Director, The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh
"Foundations
of Civil Society: Decorum, Scale, and Conversation"
Yuri
Maltsev,
Former advisor to Gorbachevs
government on Perestroika and Prof. of Economics,
Carthage College
"To
Big to Fail? Lessons from the Demise of the Soviet Union"
Donald Livingston, Prof. of Philosophy, Emory University
"Secession:
the Founding Principle of American Republicanism."
Thomas Naylor, Emeritus Prof. of Economics, Duke University and Founder of the Second Vermont Republic
"The
Vermont Village Green: An Alternative to Empire"
Lawrence
M. Reed,
President, Foundation for Economic Education
"Money
Mischief and the March of Centralization"
Kirkpatrick Sale, Director of The Middlebury Institute and author of The Human Scale
"To
the Size of States there is a Limit:
The Human Scale of Secession"
Kyle Scott, Prof. of Political Science, University of Houston
"Get
the State Out: Moving Beyond State-Centered Discussions of
Federalism"
Clyde Wilson, Distinguished Emeritus Prof. of History, University of South Carolina
"Greed
and Centralisation in American History"
View the Conference Schedule
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