I think that you do that, in order to deliver what you think is an insult to Calhoun's memory.
He did not advocate secession, but rather worked for the Missouri Compromise. He does not belong in the ranks of the secessionists. His nullification theory was also aimed at preserving the Union and mitigating differences over the Tariff. The doctrine was erroneous and was swept aside. Nevertheless, his motive for offering it wasn't disunion.
Not at all. You are quite correct in pointing out that Calhoun developed other political theories, such as "nullification" and "concurrent majority" to avoid the potential for unilateral secession. But it was Calhoun who, in the late 1820's and into the 1840's laid the theoretical framework for the confederate secession.
"The main argument of Calhoun and the other southern militants heavily depended on the presumption, reiterating it until it seemed to become an axiom, that slaveholding was a right anterior to the Constitution, which had been confirmed and guaranteed by the Constitution, but at the same time remained wholly exempt from Federal control. This combination of protection and immunity, according to the militant theory, extended to slavery wherever it existed in the Union." (Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, p 80.)
Slaveholding is not defined as a right in the Constitution, and the Congress, prior to the ratification of the Constitution had established its power to regulate slavery in the territories (for instance, in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787).
"... John Calhoun had argued [in the 1830's] that the South needed to do more than drift so far as the Declaration of Independence was concerned. Preferring to begin the hard work of converting the South to a theory that could support both hierarchy and oligarchy, Calhoun wanted to reject Jefferson's old ideology ["All men are created equal"] outright, for, as he acknowledged publicly, it clearly included [Negroes] within its scope. The South Carolinian proslavery thinker/politician found this inclusion completely unacceptable and not correctable by bastardizing its original meaning. Few southerners followed his advice, preferring the easier course, advanced by Taney and Douglas, of merely restricting the Declaration for Whites only." (Fehrenbacher, p 289-290)
"... Calhoun's reformulation of the doctrine of state rights had as its necessary foundation the denial of any authority to July 4, 1776, as the time of the formation of the Union. For Calhoun, that date the the occasion for the independence of thirteen separate (not united) states, which at that moment became as legally independent of each other as of Great Britain. For Calhoun, the statement of principles at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence had no authority whatever for the constitutions, state and federal, that followed upon it.... [T]hat the Union became operative in 1789 was wholly dependent for its existence upon the ratification process, and that the ratification process was therefor competent to dissolve the union that had preceded it, is the heart of the argument for secession as a constitutional right." Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom, p 189.
It might fairly be said that Madison anticipated that sort of reasoning in Federalist #43. In that issue, Madison provides a link between the Declaration and the proposed Constitutional Union - which was not a league or compact between independent sovereigns. Calhoun was a proponent of the "weak compact" theory of the Constitution. Almost without exception, all secessionists follow Calhoun's misguided lead.
His nullification theory was an attempt to make the States dominant over the Federal government.
After the peoples representives had been sent to Congress, what Congress passed the States were obligated to accept as law.
It was for this reason that President Jackson threatened to hang Callouhn if the nullification wasn't revoked.