The Mind of the Master Class
Books & Culture likes a new book about the South: The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. Link. Excerpts:
In 21st-century America, antebellum Southern slaveholders . . . stand for everything that is repulsive in American history. Racist, violent, misogynist, willing to destroy the nation to preserve their "peculiar institution," slaveholders in post-civil rights movement America are about as politically incorrect a subject for sympathetic study as any scholar could choose to explore. "To modern sensibilities," the Genoveses recognize, "it is a preposterous idea that a slave system could engender admirable virtues. ”¦ In our own time it seems perverse, not to say impossible, to try to separate the horror of slavery from the positive features of an ordered and independent social system."
Yet . . . the Genoveses have chosen to invest years of significant research into reconstructing the slaveholders' intellectual world and its place in the larger currents of Western thought. They do not come to their subject as fellow-believers caught up in some neo-Confederate madness, and in fact have written often and compassionately on the inhumanity of slavery. But still they persist in their intellectual project. In so doing, they disentangle the "horror" of slavery from the genuine virtues of a corporate social ethic that has virtually disappeared in modern industrial America. As well, they issue a powerful critique of northern conceits by showing how the defeat of the Confederacy meant not less racism, but more. Northern victory promoted a "new racism" that empowered the American white race "to rule the world, civilize the heathens of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and rightfully put them to work for the master race." . . .
The depth and range of the Genoveses' exploration of Planter intellectual culture and education is no less thorough and encyclopedic. Like Miller they probe deeply into the antebellum world of sermons and theology, and like Miller they also examine higher education and the authors read and studied by the slave-holding élites. In the Plantation South, no less than Puritan New England, public culture was defined by a learned mix of classical history and theology. Ancients were read widely in the South, and knowledge of Greek and Latin was a highly valued skill that any gentleman should possess. The medieval Schoolmen were read also with approval, despite their Roman Catholic context. (By war's end, some Southern intellectuals were actually wondering if the Reformation–with its individualistic ethos–was a good thing after all.) "Modern" philosophers from Hume to Locke were read, critiqued, and integrated into a distinctive Southern world view which privileged the corporate and hierarchical social ethic that upheld slavery as a positive good.
It'd make a good Christmas present, if anyone in my family is reading this.
