Flashback to influential historian Richard Hofstadter, who writes about John C. Calhoun:
Before Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, Calhoun laid down an analysis of American politics and the sectional struggle which foreshadowed some of the seminal ideas of Marx's system. A brilliant if narrow dialectician, probably the last American statesman to do any primary political thinking, he placed the central ideas of "scientific" socialism in an inverted framework of moral values and produced an arresting defense of reaction, a sort of intellectual Black Mass.An article well worth your time. Class conflict is here , in America.
