Donald Livingston (1938-) was an American academic and the founder of the neo-Confederate Abbeville Institute.
Biography[]
Donald Livingston was raised in South Carolina, and he joined the Sons of Confederate Veterans and taught at several venues before becoming a professor of philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Livingston held neo-Confederate views such as the belief that the United States was a compact between individual states and the federal government, and that states had the right to nullify federal legislation and secede. Livingston also viewed the American Revolutionary War as an act of secession from Britain rather than a revolution, morally justifying the Confederacy's secession. Livingston contrasted Jeffersonian states' rights ideology with the "Lincolnian" system of governance, under which individual states were supposedly treated as mere counties by a centralized federal government. In 2003, Livingston cofounded the Abbeville Institute, named for the birthplace of the Confederacy, to focus on issues such as Southern conservatism, secession, and nullification.