"Hegemony" by Another Name

Abstract

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 828 pp. Supplementary references, notes, and index. $29.00. A little over a year ago, in its Winter 2004 issue, the Radical History Review hosted a "Genovese Forum," with articles by a group of scholars that included Manisha Sinha, James Livingstone, James Oakes, Peter Kolchin, and Diane Miller Sommerville. The objective of the forum was to assess the complex legacy of Eugene Genovese's work in southern history, almost forty years after the publication of Genovese's first book, especially in light of his move from a radical Marxist to a conservative traditionalist view of the antebellum South and of history in general. Despite the fact that, at first sight, radicalism and conservatism would appear to have little in common, the emphasis in the articles was clearly on continuity, rather than on change. In other words, according to the participants in the forum, Genovese's recent conservative turn—in which he has been joined by his wife and co-author Elizabeth Fox-Genovese—clearly had its roots in aspects of his former Marxist position.1 At the end of her very perceptive, though somewhat overtly critical, article on Genovese as a "Marxist conservative"—a formula that encapsulates well the entire forty-year course of Genovese's thought and could be equally applied to Fox Genovese's—Manisha Sinha asked "will his [Genovese's] forthcoming book on the mind of the slaveholders prove a fitting capstone to a long and distinguished career?" She also wondered if Genovese would have kept at least some of the historical materialism that had characterized his former studies in his analysis of the slaveholders' worldview, despite his clear repudiation of Marxism. Now that Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese have finally published their long-awaited study—which was more than twenty years in the making—on The Mind of the Master Class, we can answer both questions. The answer to the first question is a yes, though with some reservations, while the answer to the second question is a sound no.2 There is little doubt that The Mind of the Master Class is the kind of monumental work of scholarship that provides a very fitting capstone to both Fox-Genovese's [End Page 332] and Genovese's careers as southern historians. Roughly the same size of Genovese's monumental Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), equally sophisticated in historical analysis and depth of scholarship, encyclopedic in the number and variety of primary and secondary sources consulted, the book has all the necessary ingredients to be the next Bancroft Prize winner. The endorsements on the back cover—by a host of illustrious historians that include Paul Conkin, William Freehling, Gary Gallagher, David Moltke-Hansen, Mark Noll, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown—testify to that. In its astoundingly learned presentation of the different facets of antebellum southern thought, The Mind of the Master Class has already been compared to Michael O'Brien's equally encyclopedic and prize-winning Conjectures of Order (2004), and it is now clear that, thanks to both these studies, research on the intellectual life of the Old South, previously languishing, has received such a giant boost that it will never be the same. Yet, two of the reviews of The Mind of the Master Class that have appeared so far have pointed out already a number of negative features, in terms of both form and content. For Paul Harvey, who reviewed it on H-Net, the book lacked the "majestic narrative" of Roll, Jordan, Roll, had too many quotes and detail, was difficult to read, lacked a clear argument, and, above all, showed too much sympathy for southern slaveholders, to the point of calling the Civil War the "War of Southern Independence." For Steven Hahn, who reviewed it in The New Republic, the book "is intellectual history of the most traditional sort . . . framed by the old Marxist...