Historian Eugene Genovese
George Fredrickson in the New York Review of Books They'll Take Their Stand 05/25/06 writes about the admiration of historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese for the antebellum slave South:
For Eugene Genovese the Old South has always been anticapitalist and antiliberal. But until the 1990s he linked this interpretation to Marxian radicalism. In such works as The World the Slaveholders Made, one can find an undertone of approbation of the slaveholders - whatever else they might have been, at least they were not liberal or capitalist. But it was clear that for Genovese, socialism and not some kind of traditional society was the right solution for the excesses of individualism that modern society engendered. In The Fruits of Merchant Capital, published in 1983, Fox-Genovese and Genovese, in their first collaboration, described the antebellum South as a "hybrid" society in which pre-capitalist and capitalist values coexisted in a state of apparently unresolveable tension. In The Mind of the Master Class, however, they argue that the inherently individualistic character of Protestantism prevented the slaveholders from developing a consistent and coherent worldview. "Protestantism's inherent tendencies toward radical individualism and democratization posed a direct threat to the South's slaveholding social order," they write. This truth was clear to Catholics, who "while denying the inherent sinful-ness of slavery, recognized the Protestant origins of an individualism that should logically have rejected slavery." They go on to quote with apparent sympathy a South Carolina priest's pronouncement that "it is only under Catholic governments, where the church can regulate the relative duties between the servant and the master, that slavery can exist as a Christian institution."That passage is interesting because it gives a glimpse at the variety of interpretations that one finds in historical analysis and theorizing about the Old South.
By suggesting that for most slaveholders a problem of identity arose from the fact that they had the wrong kind of religion, the Genoveses echo Allen Tate's "Remarks on the Southern Religion" in I'll Take My Stand, the 1930 manifesto of the Southern Agrarians. (It is somewhat surprising that the Genoveses do not mention or cite this essay; for its argument is remarkably similar to theirs.) According to Tate, the Old South "was a feudal society without a feudal religion." Its error was that "it tried to encompass its destiny within the terms of Protestantism, in origin, non-agrarian and trading religion...." In the essay Tate does not specifically invoke Catholicism as an alternative, and somewhat ruefully admits his own lack of religious belief. But it is no surprise that he later converted to Catholicism. According to both Tate and the Genoveses, Protestantism inevitably encourages industrialism, capitalism, and laissez-faire liberalism, all of which, in the words of the latter, threatened the South's "simultaneous preference for the corporatism of the family as the fundamental institution of society." (That an ethically or even religiously based democratic socialism might be a third option is a possibility they do not discuss.) [my emphasis]
It's also weirdly fascinating to me how Eugene Genovese - one of whose works I quoted in yesterday's post - who early in his career was seen as a leading "New Left" Marxist historian, wound up as an admirer of Southern slaveowners. I don't buy the common notion that "far right" and "far left" are somehow very close to each other in some kind of ideological circle in which if you go far enough "left" you wind up on the "right", and vice versa.
Some people just change their minds out of further study, or opportunism as the writing market shifts, or for personal emotional reasons. Some people are attracted to the notion of being an outsider criticizing society and mainstream ways of thinking and for that reason find themselves attracted by different extremes in different parts of their lives.
I have no idea which combination of factors may have contributed to Genovese's ideological trajectory. But he and Fox-Genovese are now seen as reactionaries who admire the slaveowner class.
The notion that American slavery was "anti-capitalist" and/or "feudal" doesn't hold water. Even though Fredrickson says that Eugene Genovese has been "the foremost authority on the political economy of antebellum Southern slavery." Capitalism and its magical markets in themselves have no moral standards. Property in human beings can be traded on the market just like sugar or cattle. The Southern slave economy was a capitalist economy, though not one that fully accepted classical liberalism. The fact that Northern and Southern polemicists loved to verbally trash the other's economic failings, both sides were practicing a form of capitalism. As Fredrickson writes, "Without racial slavery as the basis of its distinctiveness, the Old South would not have differed all that much from the North."
Fredrickson in reviewing the Genoveses' book The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, criticizes the book because "they mainly discuss the mentality of a handful of highly articulate planter intellectuals." But for our puroses, the list of those intellectuals is worth noting: "Thomas R. Dew, Robert L. Dabney, J.D.B. DeBow, George Fitzhugh, George Frederick Holmes, Louisa McCord, Edmund Ruffin, and James Henly Thornwell".
Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, eugene genovese, slavery
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