Donald Livingston is a professor of philosophy at Emory University with an expertise in the writings of David Hume. Livingston received his doctorate at Washington University in 1965. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and is on the editorial board of Hume Studies and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Livingston's books include Hume's Philosophy of Common Life and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium.[1]
Livingston has developed some renown as a constitutional scholar and is an expositor of the compact nature of the Union, with its concomitant doctrines of corporate resistance, nullification, and secession. Chris Hedges has called him "one of the intellectual godfathers of the secessionist movement."[2] The doctrine coincides with federalism, states' rights, the principle of subsidiarity. His political philosophy embodies the decentralizing themes echoed by Europeans such as Althusius, David Hume, and Lord Acton and Americans such as Thomas Jefferson, Spencer Roane, Abel Parker Upshur, Robert Hayne and John Calhoun, which holds the community and family as the elemental units of political society. As Livingston affirms, the compact nature of the Union is opposed to the innovative nationalist theory of Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln which contends for an indivisible sovereignty, an inviolable aggregate people, and that the American Union created the States following the American War for Independence. This theory as articulated by Lincoln has been characterized by Livingston as "Lincoln's Spectacular Lie." [3]
Livingston is currently engaged in a book-length study on the moral, legal, and philosophical meaning of secession.[1]
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In 1998, Livingston was instrumental in the founding of the Abbeville Institute. According to its website, the Institute is "an association of scholars in higher education devoted to a critical study of what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition". Its principal activities are a summer school for graduate students and an annual scholar's conference.[4] It focuses particularly on issues of secession which are kept out of mainstream academia.[5] The Institute is named for the South Carolina hometown of John Calhoun, and a pre-Civil War hotbed of secession. [6]
Notable faculty include:
In January 2010, Livingstone told the New York Times the institute is a "way to discuss Southern topics misrepresented in today’s classrooms. Or, as Livingston puts it, to examine Southern tradition 'in terms of its own inner light' rather than 'as a function of the ideological needs of others.'"[7]