Natural Aristocracy Research Articles

THE IDEA OF “SOCIAL EQUALITY” AND ITS INTERPRETATION IN THE MAIN IDEOLOGICAL PARADIGMS OF WESTERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. In the analysis of the ideas of social equality, inequality and justice through the prism of the main ideological paradigms of political philosophy, we rely on the ideas of the classics of philosophical thought (Plato, Aristotle, J. de Maistre, K. Marx, A. Camus) and on modern theorists of egalitarianism (J. Rawls, J. Pole, H. Phelps Brown, F. Hayek, R. Dworkin, etc.). The research objective. First, we will consider the different gradations of social equality, and look at the main arguments in favor of equality from the point of view of egalitarianism. Next, we will analyze how the idea of equality is interpreted in three key ideological traditions (paradigms) of Western social and political thought: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. The statement of basic materials. The main gradations of social equality are considered, in particular, formal equality, equality of treatment, equality of opportunities, equality of consideration. It is noted that the philosophy of conservatism, as nostalgia for the state system of the ancient regime, denies equality and acts as an apologist for social inequality expressed in the idea of natural aristocracy. The philosophy of liberalism focuses attention on the formal aspects of equality before the law and political equality. Liberalism is based on the idea of meritocracy, where the equality of starting opportunities allows us to reveal the inequality of human potential. If the tradition of liberalism is characterized by a combination of the ideas of equality and individualism, then for socialism equality is necessarily connected with the idea of the dominance of the collective over the individual. The highest non-ideological gradation of equality is equality of consideration, which can also be called the ontological equality of all people.

God's Brigands: People, Party, and Sect in Flavius Josephus's Bellum Judaicum

AbstractRenowned as a historian, Flavius Josephus enjoys little reputation as a political thinker. As heir to the classical historical tradition of Thucydides, however, considerations of the regime remained primary for him. All the more so given his most important task not inherited from them: the defense of the Jewish law and people against their pagan detractors. Josephus defended the law as having specified the best political regime (which he called “theocracy” but by which he meant a rigorous natural aristocracy). He defended the people as faithful to that law and as innocent of the terrible excesses of the great uprising of 66 CE. In so doing he was compelled to confront a phenomenon unknown to his classical predecessors: a politics not of class divisions but of sectarian ones. His response to it uncannily anticipated features of the modern (post-Machiavellian) reinterpretation of politics in terms of “peoples” and “elites.”

Hobbes and Spinoza on Sovereign Education

Most comparisons of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza focus on the difference in understanding of natural right. We argue that Hobbes also places more weight on a rudimentary and exclusive education of the public by the state. We show that the difference is related to deeper disagreements over the prospect of Enlightenment. Hobbes is more sanguine than Spinoza about using the state to make people rational. Spinoza considers misguided an overemphasis on publicly educating everyone out of superstition—public education is important, but modes of superstition may remain and must be offset by institutions and a civil religion. The differences are confirmed by Spinoza’s interest in the philosopher who stands apart and whose flourishing may be protected, but not simply brought about, by rudimentary public education. Spinoza’s openness to a wisdom-loving elite in a democracy also sets up an interesting parallel with Thomas Jefferson’s own commitment to the natural aristocracy needed to sustain republicanism. In demonstrating the 17th century philosopher’s skepticism toward using the state exclusively to promote rationality, even as he recognizes the importance of a sovereign pedagogical role and the protection of philosophy, we move to suggest that Spinoza is relevant to contemporary debates about public education and may reinvigorate moral and political discourse in a liberal democracy.

ڕوانگەى هزرمەندانى لیبرال-پارێزگار بۆ کۆمەڵگەى مەدەنى: هزری (ئیدمۆند بێرک، ئەلێکسی دى تۆکڤێل، مایکل ئەواکشۆت) بەنمونە (توێژینەوەیەکى شیکارى ـ بەراوردکارییە)

Civil society carries different and multifaceted meanings and also changes according to historical progress and different philosophical views, the political meaning of the concept is the political development of societies and institutions and relations. Opinions are varying on the meaning of different civil society; the liberal mind emphasizes freedom and individuality in the development of civil society for the sake of individual well-being. But as the worldview of the liberal mind changes according to the differences in the direction of liberalism, conservative liberal intellectual thinkers believe in civil development of communities towards welfare by the condition of preserving civil values and norms, Liberal thinkers, who are governors of how and how to preserve those values and norms, are also different. (Edmund Burke) believes in the preservation of the natural aristocracy, (Alexis de Tocqueville) sees individualism as the basis of democracy in the spirit of the growth of civil society, and (Michael Oakeshott) believes that active liberal individual on the basis of adherence to behavior for the sake of harmony between law and behavior, shortening of the law interference, and daily individual activities can be the main factors of civil society which forgiveness and social harmony have been guaranteed.

The thought of (Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Michael Oakeshott) as a model – an analytical comparative study

Civil society carries different and multifaceted meanings and also changes according to historical progress and different philosophical views, the political meaning of the concept is the political development of societies and institutions and relations. Opinions are varying on the meaning of different civil society; the liberal mind emphasizes freedom and individuality in the development of civil society for the sake of individual well-being. But as the worldview of the liberal mind changes according to the differences in the direction of liberalism, conservative liberal intellectual thinkers believe in civil development of communities towards welfare by the condition of preserving civil values and norms, Liberal thinkers, who are governors of how and how to preserve those values and norms, are also different. (Edmund Burke) believes in the preservation of the natural aristocracy, (Alexis de Tocqueville) sees individualism as the basis of democracy in the spirit of the growth of civil society, and (Michael Oakeshott) believes that active liberal individual on the basis of adherence to behavior for the sake of harmony between law and behavior, shortening of the law interference, and daily individual activities can be the main factors of civil society which forgiveness and social harmony have been guaranteed.

The Political Rules of the Democratic Republic of America.

In his transformation of the American constitution from a natural rights republic, based on Jefferson’s Declaration, to the British social class mixed government, Madison had to modify the British political party system to fit his vision of rule by the virtuous natural aristocracy. The British political system is based upon a multi-party parliamentary system of proportional representation. The British political parties compete for votes, based upon their expression of how their party will serve the national public purpose of the United Kingdom. The political party that promotes the most popular version of Res Publica wins a plurality of elected representatives, and that political party gets to form the new British government. As he did in failing to adopt the entire British judicial system, Madison also failed to incorporate key elements of the British parliamentary system into his new constitutional rules.

Craig Bruce Smith. American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era.

Honor, virtue, and ethics are the driving forces behind this fresh look at the American Revolution. Such a focus may strike some scholars as quizzical or even downright dangerous; Craig Bruce Smith anticipates these objections as he introduces his careful and colorful study American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era. Smith analyzes “American variants of honor that are in several ways unique to a nonaristocratic Western nation” (251 n. 4). He highlights several distinct features of American honor, particularly Benjamin Franklin’s notion of “ascending honor”: Franklin believed that an ethics-based meritocracy ought to supersede older notions of hereditary honor (12). And so Smith’s book revives the republican synthesis. Its narrative structure echoes Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) by tracing the triumph of a natural aristocracy (ethocracy?) over the monarchical Leviathan, followed by a Jacksonian-style fall from grace. For a brief moment, Americans put their best selves in the service of national virtue and the public good, until the ascendance of individualism led to atomization and archaic assertions of personal honor. Republican honor, with its persistent inequalities and loose guardrails against selfishness, gave way in fairly short order. As Jan Lewis wrote in “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” “Republican advocacy of virtue was powerless before persons who had no conscience” (William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 [October 1987]: 689–721, here 715).

Chapter 4. Justice and the Rule of Law (Excerpt)

The Preamble to the U. S. Constitution explains that part of the purpose in establishing the new government was to “establish justice.” Madison promised, in Federalist #51, that: Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign, as in a state of nature where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger. As he so often did throughout his life, Madison flip-flopped on the purpose of government, when it suited his purpose. In another document, Madison stated that the purpose of government was to protect the property rights of the natural aristocracy: Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own. While Madison referenced the term “justice” in Federalist #51, he never defined in that document what the term meant in the context of the new government. Justice and protection of property meant the same thing, and were interchangeable, in Madison’s constitution.

“Not of the Modern French School”: Literary Conservatism and the Ancien Régime in Early American Periodicals

At the turn of the nineteenth century, after years of denouncing the French Revolution and the influence of French politics and philosophy on American culture, Federalist writers began to invoke Old Regime France as a symbol of the traditional values that they perceived to be under threat in Jeffersonian America. This essay explores the dialectical relationship between the ancien régime and “the modern French school” in Federalist periodical writing and argues that the concept of the ancien régime emerged in reaction to the embrace of an increasingly democratic, egalitarian political discourse by Jefferson’s supporters. Writers for the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States and Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio invoked an idealized image of France’s Old Regime to legitimize their own political and aesthetic values against the supposed democratization, or “leveling,” of American culture; to argue for the need for a “natural aristocracy” to govern the U.S. republic; and to establish proper taste in literature as one of the standards through which this elite class would distinguish itself. Tracing these uses of the ancien régime in Federalist periodical writing, this essay argues that the emergence of American conservatism as a self-conscious political and aesthetic project owes as much to engagements with French as with British conservatism.

The Novelist as Organic Intellectual: William Hill Brown’sThe Power of Sympathy, Reconsidered

AbstractScholars of material and print culture have recently challenged the theory of an early American public sphere, arguing that the literary landscape of eighteenth-century America was composed instead of fragmented publics, local networks frequently partisan in nature. This essay theorizes how the novel genre functions within these publics by reconsidering the literary career of William Hill Brown, best known as the author of The Power of Sympathy (1789). Reading his lesser-known writings, I argue that Brown was an intellectual for a prominent network—often referred to as the natural aristocracy—and saw the novel genre as a means to disperse his network’s ideology to a growing novel-reading audience. I conclude by reevaluating The Power of Sympathy in light of Brown’s commitment to the natural aristocracy, which provides a model for considering the novel genre within the framework of local publics rather than as part of a universal public sphere.

Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by Brian Steele (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by Brian Steele Jeremy D. Bailey (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Role of government, Republicanism, American exceptionalism Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood. By Brian Steele. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Pp. 321. Hardcover, $99.00.) In Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood, Brian Steele argues that Jefferson's seeming contradictions can be resolved through a reconceptualization of the American nation in Jefferson's politics. Steele's book is ambitiously conceived and beautifully executed. It is nothing less than a stunning success. He divides his study of Jefferson and nationhood into six chapters: American Story, American Woman, American Public, American Character, American State, and American Union. The first substantive chapter sets the tone for the book by attempting to solve the creed vs. culture debate by showing what was distinctive about Jefferson's contribution to the argument for independence. Culture wins: "there is no generally applicable claim in the Declaration" (41). This argument will strike some (at least in my discipline) as going too far. Steele says that what made Jefferson's argument "distinctive" was not its rejection of Parliament's power over the colonies but rather "its historical argument about the experience that ultimately made Americans a distinct people" (24). The author argues that Jefferson perceived that it was not enough for one people to declare the causes that require them [End Page 560] to separate from another people—because "two peoples cannot become two overnight" (12). So Steele's Jefferson found his argument for expatriation in the "migration of original settlers to America" (25), an argument Jefferson derived by reversing (or extending) the application of tacit assent. This argument then enabled Jefferson to connect a historical people to a revolutionary principle. For Steele, it was both radical and "startlingly conservative" (49) at the same time. But theorizing "the people" requires more than connecting historical migration to the right of revolution, and in the next chapter Steele continues by examining Jefferson's view of republican women. The author adeptly compares Jefferson's treatment of Indian women with his criticism of women in Europe, particularly France. In Jefferson's view, both cultures upset the natural equality that women would otherwise enjoy. Indians forced women to work the soil, and the French allowed their aristocratic women to wander too close to political life, squandering their days amid the buzz of society. Each, in Jefferson's view, disturbed the gender roles dictated by nature but achievable only in republican civilization. It turns out that America was the only civilization in history that had placed women in their proper role of republican domesticity. The problem for Jefferson, as Steele notes, is that this argument presumed that the American idea rested on a contingent American notion of gender: Nature dictated that men and women be free from "artificial barriers to happiness," yet the "natural results of such freedom were clearly different for women and men" (88). Steele takes on more seeming contradictions in the following chapters. In Chapter 3, he argues that Jefferson's cosmopolitan belief that the world would one day become more republican rested on the premise that America was exceptional. This paradox rested in turn on Jefferson's assessment that Americans were uniquely able to resist tyranny whenever it would arise—meanwhile he expressed anxiety that things might get worse. This last point deserves special mention: Jefferson's sunny optimism derived from his confidence that Americans were unusually vigilant, but it was frequently clouded by his concern that such vigilance was unnatural to most people. Chapter 4 contains several important claims about Jefferson's conception of the public. For Steele, scholars have been led astray by Jefferson's comments concerning the "natural aristocracy" and by his turn to partisan organization. The first was subordinated to an educated and capable citizenry. But "the real problem was finding the public" (157). With [End Page 561] respect to the second, wards were better than parties, because "Jefferson's public would be engaged in maximum participation in and would express its legitimate voice through government at all levels rather than through extragovernmental organizations so celebrated in American mythology" (165). It is in this context that Steele treats slavery. There are...

“A Genuine Republican”:

“A Genuine Republican”:

“Those Sounds That Had Obtained a Command”: Voice, Power, and Submission in Cooper’s Sea Fiction

This essay evaluates the significance of voice and “natural language” in James Fenimore Cooper’s first three maritime novels, The Pilot (1824), The Red Rover (1827), and The Water-Witch (1830). In each of those works Cooper imagines ships with absolute command hierarchies structured according to vocal power, a trait that provides evidence of a “natural aristocracy” and proves to be the sine qua non of maritime authority. Drawing on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theories of voice and elocution, I show how Cooper used the ideals of “natural language” to structure the command hierarchies on board his fictional ships. I argue that his use of such hierarchies allowed Cooper to unite two competing elements of his political imagination: on the one hand, his patriotism and reverence for the common citizenry and, on the other hand, his appreciation for a strong, legally constituted authority that would guide that citizenry. Sailors and junior officers on board Cooper’s fictional ships understand and accept that vocal ability precedes and confirms a commander’s authority, and their mute obedience to strong-voiced leaders re-flects the existence of a dictatorial shipboard government that is anything but tyrannical. By positioning voice as the foundation of power on board ship, Cooper transforms, as if by magic, nondemocratic shipboard command into an authoritarian liberalism that might also obtain on land.

From Maximin to Stonewall: Sexuality and the Afterlives of the George Circle

The “circle” around the poet Stefan George had as its foundation myth the tragic story of Maximilian Kronberger, immortalized as Maximin. This foundation myth and the homoerotic conception of community it authorized fascinated and repulsed many of Germany's most famous writers and thinkers. This article charts a much more covert reception: How did gay writers, thinkers, and activists grapple with George as a gay poet and with George as a leader of his own aesthetic-religious cult? Under the impression of the popular identification of Nazi Männerbünde with homoerotic coteries like the George-circle, the contributors of the Swiss homophile periodical Der Kreis attempted to create a different George-legend. Their George was cleansed of his authoritarianism, his celebration of the natural aristocracy of same-sex attraction. Der Kreis attempted to strip the poet of his coterie and his communitarian politics, and ultimately sought to establish a homosexuality that replaced the homoerotic “aristocracy” celebrated in George's orbit with a homosexuality fit for post-war democracy and civil society.

Editorial

Editorial

T.H. Marshall's "Citizenship and Social Class"

An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: if you start with an egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. It's a slippery slope to the end of individuality. This was not simply a social or economic claim. Once upon a time, especially in Europe, this attitude stymied equality before the law, a liberal norm most of us would now take for granted. Once upon another time, it was used also to forestall universal suffrage, now a democratic norm in any decent political order. Foes—at least many early ones—of equality before the law or universal suffrage supposed that a society ought to be governed by natural aristocracy. This later became meritocracy for many of them. Surely, this marked considerable improvement, yet meritocracy was often conceived narrowly, with little consideration of how unearned social advantages or disadvantages shape the life chances of most people.

'Ces forces obscures de l'ame': Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus

This is a well-researched and argued study, with an extensive bibliography, written from a feminist and sociological perspective. Christine Margerrison, disclaiming any ideological stance or final judgement, focuses principally on the prose fiction. Inevitably there is an element of arbitrariness in the interpretations of some aspects of Camus's complex personality and work. The author wishes to show that a ‘female stereotype’ is central to Camus's creative imagination. She establishes a paradigm into which she fits not only all the women in his writings, but also the indigenous peoples of Algeria and elsewhere, and all flawed male characters (Clamence, for example). Camus, she suggests, sees lucidity as the birthright of the male, woman being a body without a soul, instinct without intellect. His women are not so much virgins and whores as mothers and others, the pale-complexioned (European) mother representing racial purity and cultural priority. Nonetheless, even she is ambivalent, corruption and disease being passed on through her body. Female sexuality means loss of control and boundaries and thus signifies the disintegration of the colonial world. Margerrison chooses the early essay ‘La Maison mauresque’, written in 1933, when Camus was not yet 20, to set the perspective and interconnections: the architecture of the Moorish house becomes the embodiment of the dangerous ‘femininity’ of the harem, which, deep in Camus's psyche, it is claimed, characterizes the whole Arab world and women in general. The awakening of the intellectual and spiritual potential of the young male, Margerrison says, always requires the death of the Woman (L'Etranger, Caligula, La Chute), who is thereby reduced to absolute silence. Disagreeing with Rizzuto, Margerrison does not believe that Camus in any way deepened his sympathy for women or understanding of them. She places a good deal of emphasis on Camus's debt to Nietzsche, allowing however that his view changes as a result of the war. Camus dreamed of a natural aristocracy of labour and the intellect. We may add that it is d'abord l'acceptation de certains devoirs (Carnets III). This is in line with an ideal much older than Nietzsche's Übermensch. Nor can Camus's attitude to Christianity be reduced, as here, simply to an acceptance of Nietzsche's contemptuous epithet: slave religion (i.e. fit only for women!). Camus's contacts with the Dominicans and Bruckberger, or with the Jesuit Didier, his rebuke to an interviewer in 1948 (‘Je réfléchirais avant de dire comme vous que la foi chrétienne est une démission. Peut-on écrire ce mot pour un saint Augustin ou un Pascal?’, Essais, p. 380) amply show that while he refused Christianity, he never failed to respect it. Incidentally, the Renegade is not a priest, and he murders the priest who comes with le visage de la bonté. Women and Arabs are the great ‘absents’ from Camus's work (les absents ont toujours tort). Camus's deepest fears and fixations, les forces obscures de l'âme, are inferred from the fiction and essays, leaving a lot of room for discussion. Margerrison does not want to condemn Camus for being ‘a man of his time’, but, all the same, she puts the case for the prosecution very vigorously.

The Measure of Mind

The Measure of Mind J. David Hoeveler (bio) John Carson. The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xvii + 401 pp. Charts, notes, and index. $39.50. It is a simple proposition: democratic and republican governments function on the principle that all citizens deserve equal treatment. And it is a difficult question to answer: how, then, can such governments justify the inequality that derives from the disparity of intelligence and talents among individuals? In a study that ranges over two centuries and two nations that pioneered in republicanism, and among a great array of theorists and practitioners, John Carson takes up these questions. His work will give any reader much to think about. For indeed, any reflecting citizen must form some conclusions about these matters. Does nature arrange that some individuals or human types are inherently superior to others, or is society or special privilege mostly responsible for these effects? If nature is decisive, how far should a democratic state go in allowing a social elite to exercise power? Does it merit that power? Should the talented have an education different from the rest? And what are talents and intelligence anyway? How do we define and measure them? What understanding of these terms befits a democracy, such that it can properly justify the inequalities that derive from them and prevail in the social order? At the outset Carson himself seems to endorse some notion of collective intelligence, as his sprawling introduction might suggest. But he has read very widely and his ample endnotes will benefit any persons interested in this subject and peripheral ones. The Measure of Merit is an impressive piece of scholarship. Of course, many studies in intellectual history have tackled this question, mostly by examining political theories and social philosophies.1 Carson hopes to shed more light by looking at mental philosophers and psychologists among a larger group that has explored the subject of mind and intelligence. Doing so, of course, places great expectations on this group of thinkers, and it is not always the case that they intended their explorations of mind to have social readings or yield political policies. Carson, to his credit, is sensitive to social and political context and relates his subjects to the changing worlds of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. And his study [End Page 573] takes on much interest when he does. But sometimes he builds a bridge too easily traversed from the scientific realm to the social. Carson finds John Locke a useful starting point for his discussion. Indeed, Lockean ideas had considerable influence in both the countries he examines. In France Carson finds Lockean schools of associationists and sensationists, and also the influence of the (partly) Lockean rivals, the Scottish Common Sense philosophers. The author brings under review the French Enlightenment thinkers—Condillac, Condorcet, Helvétius, Rousseau. Together they reflected a concern of their movement, that the ancient regime faced a crisis of legitimacy: the old order could no longer be justified, but how might they reclaim a place for elites within a reformed system? Even with this concern as a background commonality, Carson finds much difference among the philosophes, as here and throughout his study he reads the texts with great sensitivity. Thus, for example, Condorcet may have insisted that all people, even the most savage, are natively equal, and with such confidence, he could call for a comprehensive system of education, available to all, but becoming progressively selective. Such a system would develop the talents of a new elite, trained in the sciences. A more skeptical view came from Voltaire, however: "No one will convince me that all minds are equally suitable to science," he wrote, "and that they differ only in regard to education. Nothing is more false" (p. 25). Americans also make an appearance in this first chapter. Thomas Jefferson set the terms of discussion for the young republic in articulating his concept of a natural aristocracy and his preference for it. That "natural aristocracy among men," rooted in virtue and talents as opposed to wealth and birth, Jefferson believed, could secure democracy on a safe foundation. John Adams had...

Screening before Sanctioning

In modern political science, repeated elections are considered as the main mechanism of electoral accountability in democracies. More rarely, elections are considered as ways to select ‘good types’ of politicians. In this article it is argued that historical republican authors interpreted elections in this last sense. They viewed elections as a means to select what they often called the ‘natural aristocracy’, virtuous political leaders who would pursue the common good. This argument is presented in three steps. First, it is claimed that republican authors did not consider retrospective accountability as one of the goals of electoral processes. Second, I present some evidence concerning the distinction in republican authors between two types of politicians, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. And, finally, I present some republican arguments about how elections could serve as a device for selecting the ‘good’ politicians.

Wister’s “Life Among The Lowly” and Anglocentrism

W lS T E R ’S “L IF E A M O N G T H E L O W L Y ” A N D A N G L O C E N T R IS M K e n n e t h A l a n H o v e y Scholars have long agreed that in The Virginian (1902) Owen Wister transformed elements from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and the late nineteenth-century dime novels Cooper’s works spawned into a for­ mula that created the modem Western. Although The Virginian has not been blamed for all the excesses of the “kitsch Western,” as Leslie Fiedler dubbed its most formulaic imitations, it has been attacked by him and others since the 1960s for prejudicial Anglocentrism (139). Wister has been declared a “white supremacist” (Tompkins 147), his fictional West viewed as offering “justification for the extermination of the Indian” (Fiedler 139; cf. Kaplan 260) and upholding something “akin to a racist version of Jefferson’s Natural Aristocracy” (Cobbs 108), his chief novel read as supporting ethnic “prejudices, including anti-Semitism” (Payne 204), and its hero charged with “deriding the intelligence of Negroes” and not “consider[ing] Indians humans” (White 143). While all these offenses are ascribed directly or indirectly to Wister’s bestseller, even the most ardent critic of his ethnic views is forced to admit that “Wister’s Anglo-Saxon chauvinism is not spelled out in capital letters in The Virginian” (Tompkins 147). The basis for them is, however, spelled out in capitals in his essay “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher” (1895). It is in light of this essay that the novel has been constantly read and found wanting, while the major differences between the two works have been overlooked, so much so that the two have simply been read as one (e.g., Nye 289-90). As Ben Vorpahl has explained, “The Evolution” was originally written to serve as a “credo” to Red Men and White (1895), Wister’s first volume of Western fiction, not to The Virginian (97). This credo, which Wister wrote in close collaboration with Frederic Remington, holds that the American cowboy, like the British peer, inherited from his medieval Anglo-Saxon ancestors a spirit of outdoor independence, a love of “his foster-brother,” the horse, and a “contempt for the foreigner” (604, 608). These traits are opposed, the essay maintains, by those of “Poles or Huns or Russian Jews” or, in other words, the “hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce” (604, 603-4). While Indians, who are depicted as cruel Ishmaels, and Mexicans, who are viewed as “small deceitful alien[s],” have been 3 9 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 5 “supplanted” by the “Saxon” cowboy, the essay laments that “the rider among Indians and cattle, the frontiersman, the American who replaces ... the Pathfinder, is now beneath the notice of polite writers” (608, 614, 606). Wister sought to recover the Saxon Pathfinder for a contemporary audience in Red Men and White. In its interlocking tales Native Americans are hostile primitives, Mexican Americans a “basking Southern breed” (179-80), African Americans in the person of one woman of “incoherent mind and simple heart” comic relief (251), and “Saxons” heroes. One tale repeats the central situation of Cooper’s The Prairie (1824), a young and beautiful Spanish American woman from the Southwest distanced from her Anglo-American lover by an inter­ posing other. Wister’s other is a “swarthy” and “irresponsible” Mexican, while the worthy lover is a blue-eyed, yellow-haired cowboy with a golden mustache and a white horse (159). Nothing like this is to be found, however, in The Virginian. Its epony­ mous hero has an indeterminate eye-color and is distinguished by his “swarthy” complexion and black hair (90, 258, 267).1 He is, in fact, so dark that the heroine first describes him as “that black man” (89). The words “Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxon” do not appear in the...