Politics & Power Quote by John C. Calhoun

A warning dressed up as diagnosis, Calhoun frames finance not as a sector but as a new sovereign. The line’s engine is its scale-shift: “greater than the people themselves” turns ordinary democratic anxiety into something almost geological, a mass that can’t be voted out because it isn’t a single actor. “Many and various and powerful interests” is a roll call of factions, but the syntax deliberately collapses them into “one mass,” implying that pluralism has curdled into cartel. The threat isn’t just corruption; it’s cohesion. Money, he suggests, solves the one problem elites historically have: coordination.

The key phrase is “the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.” Surplus isn’t merely wealth; it’s excess liquidity looking for influence, the kind that can lubricate alliances between politicians, creditors, contractors, and regional power brokers. Calhoun is describing an early version of what later critics would call a financial oligarchy: a system where institutions outlast elections and where policy bends toward stability for capital, not responsiveness to citizens.

Context matters because Calhoun wasn’t a neutral tribune of the masses. Writing in the age of the Second Bank of the United States and recurring panics, he’s channeling Jacksonian-era suspicion of centralized finance while defending a political order built to protect minority interests - including, fatally, slavery. The subtext is a theory of capture: once banking surplus becomes the glue, government stops being a forum and becomes an instrument, with “the people” demoted from sovereign to spectator.