The Southern Tradition : The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism

The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies

by Eugene D. Genovese

In recent years American conservatism has found a new voice, a new way of picking up the political pieces left in the wake of liberal policies. But what seems innovative, Eugene Genovese shows us, may in fact have very old roots. Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to its sources in a rich southern tradition, his book introduces a revealing perspective on the politics of our day. As much a work of political and moral philosophy as one of history, The Southern Tradition is based on the intellectual journey of one of the most influential historians of the late twentieth century. To appreciate the tradition of southern conservatism, Genovese tells us, we must first understand the relation of southern thought to politics. Toward this end, he presents a historical overview that identifies the tenets, sensibilities, and attitudes of the southern-conservative world view. With these conditions in mind, he considers such political and constitutional issues as state rights, concurrent majority, and the nature and locus of political power in a constitutional republic. Of special interest are the southern-conservative critiques of equality and democracy, and of the Leviathan state in its liberal, socialist, and fascist forms. Genovese examines these critiques in light of the specific concept of property that has been central to southern social and political thought. Not only does this book illuminate a political tradition grounded in the writings of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, but it shows how this lineage has been augmented by powerful literary figures such as Allen Tate, Lewis Simpson, and Robert Penn Warren. Genovese here reconstitutes the historical canon, reenvisions the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative tradition, and broadens the spectrum of political debate for our time.

Genres: History, Politics, American History, Nonfiction, Cultural

154 pages, Hardcover

First published July 22, 1994

About the author

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the Left and Marxism, and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two things to note so far.

1) Capitalism and socialism have only recently become the only two options, sort of like voting Democrat or Republican. Genovese discusses a number of antebellum Southern thinkers who saw the coming capitalist revolution...and hated it.

2) American history is VERY complicated, and anyone who tries to put cut-and-dried labels on any one man, much less a region or a movement, is not simplifying, but falsifying. That's what you get with a highly literate democracy.

3) My personal speculation is that only since the USSR fell can America's role in history even start to be pegged down. As with all history, there are multiple perspectives from which it may be viewed, but America happened along at such a complicated (and unprecedented) time in the history of the world that we should speak of exponentially great numbers of perspectives, not simply multiplificationally great (as they say in academia). At the highest level, America's role could be explained in two stages: first, she served as the focal point of Christendom's transition from, well, Christendom, to the ideal nation of modernity. Her second stage could be summed up as THE example of the failure of this very ideal of modernity. Like Schaff says of Rome, she was the highest ideal paganism could produce, and also a shocking example of how short that ideal came.

Okay, so that was three comments. And here are some more (disorganised) comments after finishing the book:

4) Eugene Genovese is obviously a first-rate scholar. Not only has he read every book in the world that relates to his subject (which any doctoral student can do), but he manages to handle his sources very elegantly--a sure sign of a seasoned scholar. The footnotes and quotations never bog down the book or distract from the point he's making; he never simplifies, but always acknowledges the true complexity of a problem, without allowing that acknowledgement to excuse him from finally forming a firm judgement; and what is more, he writes on complicated topics with enough clarity to keep the level of detail from becoming confusing. Unlike this paragraph.

On a more personal level, he also reminded me why I decided to stay away from the scholarly fields. As an accomplished specialist in a small arena of study, his personality comes across like that of a near-sighted man, always peering, always taking the view from three inches. There's nothing particular in his writing that one could criticize on this account; I think I was only struck by this because I had recently inhaled a large dose of Gibbon--the master of the big picture, if there ever was one. Moreover, after Gibbon's magnificence amateurism a professional scholar seems disappointingly mercenary, as if Robert E Lee suddenly had turned storekeeper.

5) I am not quite clear about the chronology of Genovese's move from Marxism to Roman Catholicism, or if he would even put it so baldly as that. The final chapter of his book, however, indicated that for all his appreciation of the challenges the South offered to modernity, he did not quite get it. In this chapter he summed up the sins of modernity especially where it was challenged by the Southern tradition--most prominently a "market morality" where human relations themselves were commodified and ethics were considered irrelevant to the successful practise of business. His solution was not a return to the spiritual foundations of society, a la Richard Weaver or Russell Kirk, but...more governmental regulations! This puzzled me.

6) There are a lot of books I need to read.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eugene Genovese packs a lot into 103 pages. His writing, much like Richard Weaver whom he quotes often in this book, is perceptive, precise, and penetrating. He describes southern conservativism, including much of its history, its most ardent defenders, and its strengths and weaknesses.  Genovese does not claim to be a conservative, though he is a very sympathetic outsider. For most of his career he was a Marxist, but later he embraced Christianity and moved more to the right. It is evident that he is a fair critic and that he sees the best in each of the different viewpoints. He evaluates every perspective by its best articulation and its purest motives--a rare gift. 

He establishes up front that southern conservatism is a distinct tradition, separate from the broader American conservatism though the two share much in common. The main emphases of southern conservatism are summarized by Genovese late in the book: "opposition to finance capitalism and, more broadly, to the attempt to substitute the market for society itself; opposition to radical individualism that is today sweeping America; support for broad property ownership  and a market economy subsection to socially determined moral restraints; adherence to Christian individualism that condemns personal license and demands submission to a moral consensus rooted in elementary piety; and an insistence that every people must develop its own genius, based upon its special history, and must reject siren calls to an internationalism--or rather, a cosmopolitanism--that would eradicate local and national cultures and standards of personal conduct by reducing morals and all else to commodities."

In addition to battling against modernism (and post-modernism), southern conservatism has often drawn its sword against two camps, among others: (1) liberalism and (2) finance capitalism. As to the first camp, "[s]outhern conservatives have always distrusted the mass politics of liberalism and social democracy and favored the deference to duly constituted authority." They have argued for the necessity of hierarchy, deference, (appropriate) prejudice, and tradition to maintaining a stable society. Such hierarchy and prejudice should not be based on race or any other arbitrary standard, but rather on a Christian ethos. "It rests upon a belief in an omnipotent God" and is often characterized as an appeal to natural law, "which comes to us through Christian revelation and the manifestation of God's providence in nature and human history, human beings equip themselves with timeless moral truths that provide the standards for social life." 

As to the second camp, southern conservatives have warned of the inevitable result of finance capitalism and "have regarded socialism as the logical outcome of the capitalist centralization of economic and state power." Collectivization of property ownership, which finance capitalism encourages, always leads to centralization of power, even though the "free-marketeers" do not desire greater government power. "Southern conservatism has always traced the evils of the modern world to the ascendency of the profit motive and material acquisitiveness; to the conversion of small property based on individuals labor into accumulated capital manifested as financial assets; to the centralization and bureaucratization of management; to the extreme specialization of labor and the rise of consumerism; to an idolatrous cult of economic growth and scientific and technological progress; and to the destructive exploitation of nature." 

While he celebrates much of southern conservatism, he also highlights several legitimate limitations. A few of the main dilemmas he notes are:

(1) Restoring hierarchy and tradition (passing down accepted truths) in a democratic, egalitarian society. "Southern conservatives have run into the problem of who is to bell the cat: How do you convince a people raised on egalitarian and democratic dogmas to defer to duly constituted authority?" Genovese shows the futility of the southern conservative's defense of tradition in a world where that tradition has long since passed away. With the pervasiveness and acceptance of egalitarianism, the southern conservative faces the difficult task of overcoming the prejudice toward hierarchy and authority. Yet, even still, "only a strong dose of institutional authority and hierarchy could preserve the distinctness essential to the preservation of freedom. . . in a larger society."

(2) Restoring small and middling property ownership. Southern conservatives have fiercely opposed "unbridled capitalism" and those who would allow the free-market to serve as the center of society. And this is right and good. Their insight into the relationship between property and power is to be celebrated. Yet, southern conservatives have struggled with articulating a system of property that could be "an adequate social basis for decentralization." If the conservatives are tasked with reviving, rather than defending or sustaining, private property (that is, truly private property which is held and worked by responsible owners distributed widely throughout the society) they will likely need more authority and power than allowed for in their principles. Genovese's only hint at a resolution to this dilemma is his brief comment that "the only viable solution to moral as well as political and economic degeneracy must come from a struggle to shape the nation-state itself."

(3) Individual freedom and social order. "Southern conservatives, like all sensible people, try to balance two sets of legitimate claims--those of individual freedom and those of community discipline and social order." They have done this mainly by denouncing radical individualism and positing instead "social bond individualism." At a time, however, when our communities have already suffered systemic decay, the southern conservative is forced to "find a way to recreate the essence of their preferred rural and small-town communities" in a context that is generally corrosive to true community. This decline in community "has occurred not despite liberal principles, but because of them." These liberal principles of personal liberation and autonomy have been swallowed whole, and it will be difficult to ask the populace to "give back certain of their right s to communities, and accept the return to certain historical forms of intolerance."

This is an important book, mainly because it sets forth the key contributions of southern conservativism that largely go unheard today due to their historic alignment with slavery and white supremacy.  As Genovese points out, however, the southern conservatives have a lot to offer in our present environment and their central strengths need not be tied to racism and oppression. The "realization of the finest values of the southern tradition requires a total break with its leagacy of racism," and this is a break that is possible because the values themselves are not intertwined with past sins.

[Matt Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating exploration of the particular variant of "conservatism" that finds its basis in the thought of the Old South and, further back, European traditionalism generally. Genovese broadly explicates and contextualizes various Southern thinkers, and shows how "southern conservatism" is strange bedfellows with what we think of as "conservatism" nowadays. The Reagan-esque form of conservatism is, and Genovese argues this convincingly, better understood as free market liberalism, and Southern conservatism, an anti-modern, anti-capitalist, decentralized, anti-State, anti-socialist, traditionalist and religious form of socio-political thought, is actually deeply opposed to what we call "conservatism," just as much as it to what we think of as liberalism. Genovese shows the problems and issues with Southern conservatism--especially as it concerns the racial attitudes and the dependence upon slavery as a form of social organization that allowed Southern conservatism to have anti-capitalism at its roots--in a fair-handedly.

Overall, though, the real strength and power of this little book is how Genovese is able to survey Southern conservatism and its myriad thinkers in a responsible and nuanced manner, showing it as a system with a basis in historically problematic and morally erroneous contingencies, yet also making a compelling case for a recognition and reconsideration of Southern conservatism as a complex and intellectually robust noncollectivist critique of the dehumanizing effects of capitalistic modernity. The political debates of 2012 make it more prescient now than it was when published in 1994, I think, as the Southern conservative tradition is increasingly reasserting itself in certain ways--although its messy entanglements with free market-oriented late capitalism complicate its critique in ways that Genovese's readings of the Southern conservative tradition illuminate.

[Matt Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is very informative and provacative. I would have given it five stars except that some portions are disjointed and don't flow together well. Nonetheless the information contained in the book is presented with polish.

[Jack R.]

Eugene Genovese, the lauded Americanist and communist turned conservative, wrote this slim volume (constituted from various lectures and articles) in the immediate aftermath of Soviet dissolution. This was the "End of History," the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism over and against the stagnant, oppressive socialist regimes stretching from Berlin to Siberia. The international left reached a nadir not seen since the crushing of the Paris Commune-- a totally demoralization and theoretical abandonment. Marxism became Post-Marxism, Communist parties became "Parties of the Left" (or in the case of China, not communist at all!), and regular socialists with ambivalence to the crusty USSR nonetheless dropped any hope for a left-wing economical framework and hopped into the neoliberal arms of Anthony Giddens and his "Third-Way" buddies. Genovese, too, jumped shipped and found a new ideological home, yet with a deeper discontinuity then the newly-minted leftist vagabonds: Southern Traditionalism.

Genovese, working from both his established literacy in antebellum political thought and uncritical readings of Southern Agrarians old and new, offers a fascinating, but underdeveloped and vague, vision for a conservatism, which he describes as "opposition to finance capitalism, and more broadly, to the attempt to substitute the market for society itself; opposition to radical individualism that is today sweeping America; support for broad property ownership and a market economy subject to socially determined moral restraints; adherence to a Christian individualism that condemns personal license and demands submission to a moral consensus rooted in elementary piety; and an insistence that every people must develop its own genius, based upon it special history, and must reject siren calls to an internationalism...that would eradicate local and national cultures and standards of personal conduct by reducing morals and all else to commodities" (98).

While stopping at race for obvious reasons, Genovese envisions a semi-decentralized American polity in which communities and regions democratically discriminate against morals, beliefs, customs, peoples, markets in order to preserve the organic character of such localities. Ordered liberty, derived from property ownership (but not the contemporary bourgeois-type, small agrarian holding, or Southern slave system), is the highest metaphysical value at play here, as he sees hierarchy and inequalities as natural (stressing again not to include race in these pronouncements) and market and/or governmental machinations promoting equality (either of outcome or opportunity) as the disastrous, dehumanizing policy of centralized totalitarianism (which, to Genovese, is only structurally possible thanks to business-based bureaucratic organization). Only property provides a bulwark against Leviathan. Yet, the author is no anti-statist or wonky libertarian, but fervently contends that the federal and state governments have a proper role to play in regulating economies to promote the moral principles of communities: "True, private ownership and the exercise of firm authority in management are essential for economic efficiency as well as the preservation of freedom. But then, the alternative to the present arrangement may well reside in the extension of republican political principles to the economy—to a constitutional arrangement that protects private interests, including right to inherit property, while it respects the ultimate power of the people, acting collectively, to establish proper limits on individual action.... we need to devise a creative system that combines social and private property ownership and renders it politically responsible" (101-102). Genovese believes material forces determine history, 0r rather that the type of property-arrangements existing determine social and political structures, religious and ideological ideals. To promote this undefined "Southern" ideal of property—mixed and mingled with regulations large and small— will strengthen communities, revive families, reestablish the moral consensus, fix problems national and international, etc, etc. Genovese, while no longer a Marxist, took with him various elements of historical materialism in his new conservative dwelling. Thus, his proposal cannot also escape from being thoroughly utopian—for this is a new epoch of economic relations beyond capitalism and socialism. The work is a nostalgic screed compromised of historical citation, beckoning a Magnolian golden age. With its hopes of limiting the excess of individualism, unregenerated conscience, free-markets, and broad-based democratic political participation, this is Genovese's Soviet Union (a place he ruefully labels as being the last bastion of "cultural conservatism" far beyond Reagan's America (83)), except every Montgomery and Memphis is a Moscow unto itself. His Marxism never changed, his hopes did not truly die on December 25th, 1991, it is all just under new terminological management. If the revolution could not be won under the Red Flag, it's legacy will be the Stars and Bars.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the worst conservative study ever written, I suspect it has its merits because Genovese was a former Marxist, meaning he has experience understanding how things work and writing about them in a succinct manner. Still, this book is mostly racist drivel and Lost Cause apologia.

[Edward]

Once again, the blogger Cambria Will Not Yield has provided some excellent thoughts on this book. http://cambriawillnotyield.blogspot.c...

Mr. Genovese, a former Marxist but excellent historian nonetheless, brings before us an array of Southern agrarians who should be studied but who are generally ignored by mainstream conservative-liberal pundits. Genovese does justice to the varied opinions of M. E. Bradford, Andrew Lytle, Alan Tate, and Richard Weaver while also focusing on the common ideas shared by all the agrarians. While they differed on the subject of what a just government should be, all the Southern agrarians were united in their critique of capitalism – the religion of the Yankee conservatives.

The agrarian critique of capitalism is, in my opinion, irrefutable. The problem with the free-market capitalism of the Buckleys, the Novaks, the Gilders, and the Limbaughs, is that an unrestrained free-market completely destroys the traditional values necessary to sustain a free-market economy. If families, neighborhoods, and God himself is made subject to the free-market, then all is cheerless, dark, deadly, and chaotic. People will turn to socialism or fascism to escape the capitalistic nightmare. And it is indeed a nightmare. Capitalism has shown itself to be more devastatingly destructive of hearth and home than communism or socialism. As dreadful as Poland was under communism, the Polish people did not face as great a danger to their faith and their families as they now face in the form of the democratic capitalism so adored by the late Michael Novak, Wall Street, and Rush Limbaugh. Our benighted nation, far from holding out a beacon light to the rest of the world, instead illustrates the terrible dangers of unchecked human pride. We are indeed a "city built on a hill" – we are a satanic city built on a hill of technology and dead souls.

Yet the free-market conservatives drone on and on, preaching happiness for all, if we would just support the capitalist crusade in Iraq and adopt the flat tax.
The free marketers wish no one ill, but their happy dream of a well ordered international economy of morally indifferent affluence for many and misery for those who cannot compete – a dream that constitutes my own private nightmare – is becoming a reality. We may indeed be on the threshold of a brave new world of affluent depravity for a good many people, perhaps even a majority of Americans. If so, I am glad to be too old to have to live with the worst of what is coming.
I have no quarrel with Mr. Genovese's presentation of the Southern agrarian case against capitalism. I do disagree with him on the issue of racism. While admiring the agrarians, Mr. Genovese deplores their racist support of segregation. Donald Davidson is especially singled out for his opposition to integration. Mr. Genovese is schizophrenic. He fails to understand that without segregation, the values of white Southerners whom he admires, such as Donald Davidson, would be no different from the values of the Northern capitalists, whom he deplores. New south "conservatives" like Newt Gingrich can be part of the New World Order because they are willing to trade Christian civilization for the new multi-racial, free-market world. But it is a spiritually impoverished world that Newt and the integrationists love, and it will come crashing down on everyone's head regardless of color. And then there will be, oh rapture of raptures, equality – albeit the equality of the dung heap.

[Jacob Aitken]

The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservativism by Eugene Genovese

This book explores the strengths and weaknesses of probably the most rigorous form of an American conservatism. The story of the South is like a glorious tragedy—glorious because it was easily superior in culture to the North, but it was a tragedy, not simply because of slavery, but because of a number of inherent contradictions within the worldview that simply would not go away. Genovese gives a brief outline of the Southern worldview, a short history of the Constitutional debates, and whether or not Southern thinkers today can deal with the same contradictions and tensions.

The Southern conservative regards himself as the heir to Western Christian civilization (2). His religion was not that of Deism. He believed in the transcendent Triune God, but did not reduce God to extreme scrutiny nor did he rework God around man’s ideas. He had a unique form of individualism, but he did not accept the free market ideology. He believed in the social bond individualism of ancient Rome—man was an individual but this could not be understood except in terms of the community (which usually meant family, village, and church).

Problems in the Worldview
The Southerner faced the problem that every intellectual conservative—at least in the Whig tradition—faced: how does one believe in restraints upon social life and values while simultaneously preaching democratic liberalism in government and individualism in daily life? While the Southerners easily won the Constitutional debates, one suspects that they never quite answered this question. One also suspects, and Genovese never raised this issue, that a conservative monarchism easily solves this problem. The problem is one of social relations. Whether southern apologists today like to admit it or not, social relations played a huge role in the South—and this network depended entirely on slavery. The question then becomes, how do you simultaneously justify an educated elite (call it aristocracy, natural order, etc) without justifying slavery while at the same time preaching equality? It simply cannot be done.

Secondly, Southerners then and now have to deal with the problem of Capitalism, and with the rise of a radically Communist president, this problem has become rather acute. On one hand, the Southerner would not have been a socialist. He hated government intervention (indeed, he fought a nasty war over it) and believed in self-responsibility. He also was wary of what the market would bring: when moral values are suddenly neutral, and possibly something else to be bartered with, would this not destroy the networking of family and church? But at the market is a two-edged sword at this point. The Southerner knows that the market brings its own evils but at the same time, most of the blessings of the twentieth century in technology and medicine came as a result of capitalism. But the market self-destructs at this point. The market cannot sustain itself. It lacks the values upon which a society lives.



Conclusion
Genovese has done heroic work in this regard, and this book definitely needs to be re-read (I had to read it twice). The questions he posed are especially timely. He has raised a number of issues that have to be addressed, not just by Southerners, but by all conservatives interested in the future of Western Civilization.

[Don Lowrance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written by a northern author and educator who had his own journey from socialism to conservatism. Genovese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_G...) and his wife have added much to the understanding of antebellum southern life, exploring its mystic and in this case the sectional conservatism that was particular to the old south.

The traditions and attachments to the land of the old south are all but gone along with the concomitant conservatism. With industrialization and the long and harsh radical reconstruction, the South lost its mooring to a type of individualism that produced southern conservatism.

His ending note is not encouraging but as one who fell in love with the South--"get your heart in Dixie or get your ass out"--I can mourn, along with Eugene Genovese, of the loss of something Right.

W.E.B. Du Bois. "with the Right that trumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard..."

Of the Wings of Atalanta, found in the South of Black Flolk, quoted in the book by Genovese.<

[Steve Wilkerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Takes the Southern tradition seriously, not just slavery or states' rights but a deep strain of conservative thought worthy of consideration by those who are more interested in understanding than in judging.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine stuff.

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting an overview of Genovese's interpretation of trends in southern conservatism, but this book (derived from a series of his lectures) isn't really an outline or introduction to the subject so much as a series of ruminations about it. It is assumed that the reader has prior knowledge of key players and ideas: for instance, although Genovese repeatedly alludes to Richard Weaver's concept of "social bond individualism", he does not clearly and explicitly define it. In a lecture to a specialized academic audience explanatory material of this kind would be unnecessary, but one would think that, in preparing the book for a broader audience, he would have elaborated upon or explained much that is here taken as understood.

Also, Genovese's presentation of his arguments is sometimes so terse as to render them unclear, as if he feels rushed by the constraints imposed on a guest lecturer with a wide field to cover and not enough time to do it in. Conversely, he sometimes lacks a clear direction, and is beguiled into many a pleasing digression. As a result, the book's parts seem to me greater than the whole. If there is no great, synthesizing, analytical overview of southern conservatism, there is a wealth of useful information and stimulating ideas about it, not a few of them hidden in the footnotes. And Genovese certainly makes a strong concluding case that southern conservatism (not to be confused with "free-market" conservatism) has much to offer toward the reform of a society ravaged by capitalism and modernism, even if its proponents have always been better at argumentation than at implementing policy.