John C. Calhoun is best known as a leading American political figure in the first half of the nineteenth century who was the foremost defender of states rights and the interests of the South against the centralizers who sought to alter the Constitution from its original meaning.

Further to Nicolai’s post on Steven Cheung: The “theory of the firm” in economics is usually dated back to Coase (1937), with important later contributions by Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Jensen and Meckling (1976), and later contributions from Oliver Williamson, Oliver Hart, and others. Management scholars might describe Schumpeter (1934) or Penrose (1959) as having distinct theories of the firm, though their contributions are perhaps better described as theories about what firms do, not what firms are.

Among the key men involved in the American Revolution and the following periods, we find an oft-repeated concern that may seem foreign to us today—the threat of standing armies. This was a heritage of British legal thought and history, and it became an underappreciated part of American political thought and experience.

Why were peacetime standing armies viewed as such a threat?