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

Rating:
Summary: The Two Conservatisms
Review: Eugene Genovese must be the most interesting writer inAmerica. This New York-born professed Marxist analyzesconservatism more thoroughly and respectfully than many conservatives do. And one cannot grasp the antebellum South, which he treats just as respectfully, without him. In this little book, Genovese effectively argues that Southern conservatism is different from, and occasionally hostile to, what most people think of as conservatism. Southern conservatives are conservatives of community and tradition rather than Limbaughian market worshippers. Essential.

Rating:
Summary: Analyzing the Southern Tradition
Review: ~The Southern Tradition~ by Eugene Genovese is a captivating, objective examination of southern conservatism and the southern tradition. The first chapter, The Lineaments of Southern Tradition, examines southern culture and conservatism in the Old South. Traditional Protestant Christianity, an affinity for localism and agrarianism are all discussed in this chapter. Genovese point out that southern conservatives accept "hierarchy and stratification as natural, necessary and proper," at the same time resisting a tendency toward sponsorship of a self-aggrandizing elite or artificial aristocracy. The interplay of political and constitutional principles with the southern way of life is examined in the second chapter. It may be the boast of southerners that the first avowed conservatives in the U.S. were southern democrats. With luminaries like John Taylor of Caroline and John C. Calhoun, they stood opposed to Jacobin egalitarian leveling, the materialism wrought out in the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. For 19th century southerners, the Constitution allowed for the peaceful coexistence of antithetical systems of property. Genovese however disavows the contentions by those who dismiss states' rights as nothing more than an instrument for preservation of slavery. Genovese recognizes that the states' rights constitutional hermeneutic is by no means peculiar to the south, having its expression intensely felt in the north in the early 19th century. Likewise, the Hartford Convention and Pennsylvanian William Rawle's commentary affirming the constitutional right of secession demonstrates regional particularism and goes a long way to vindicate this last point. Genovese elaborates on John C. Calhoun's theorizing about "concurrent majorities" coupled with his reform-minded activism which hoped to ameliorate the crisis of the federal system. Through constitutional reform, Calhoun endeavored to essentially make the polity more federal, and thus staving off an impending sectional crisis but striving for sectional equilibrium. The essence of federalism has always been a diffusion of powers and subsidiarity. Among Calhoun's proposals emanating from his doctrine of concurrent majorities was the idea of a sectional triple presidency. With an absolute veto for each section which would effectively bar a numerical majority from oppressing and expropriating a minority.

Genovese rightly rejects simplistic reductionism perpetrated by biased political theorists and sociologists who itinerate the dubious notion that southern conservatives are in fact quasi-fascists. Genovese further notes this to be a "charge by those who know nothing about southern conservatism or fascism. Those who study both honestly will be surprised by how little fascism and southern conservatism share." The Fascist State is repugnant to parochial minded southerners. Likewise, provincial southerners with their penchant for localism are repulsed by centralism and overbearing statism.

Genovese further probes into southern conservatism's manifestations in the twentieth century discernible in the agrarian thought of Herb Agar, John Ransom, Allen Tate and Richard Weaver. These figures all seemed to recognize that corporate centralization and big government go hand in and hand. The agrarian critique of crass Yankee capitalism scolded it for monopolistic tendencies and its de facto destruction of private property while supplanting it with an irresponsible system of managerial and bureaucratically managed collective property just as socialism does. Such a collectivist economic system has a tendency to run roughshod over the individual and is destructive of traditional culture and institutions. Southern conservatives were increasingly cognizant of finance capitalism's capacity to degenerate into socialism. Big government and big business went hand in hand, and it acted as a solvent dissolving social bonds and smothering an organic, traditional civil society.

All the things considered, Genovese does an excellent job capturing the history, politics, culture and lineaments of the Southern Tradition. His objectivity for having come from the Marxist Left is to be commended. Having endured Marxist CRITs from college and their "trashing" tactics, I find it commendable and honest scholarship. Genovese arguably explains southern conservatism perhaps with more clarity, sympathy and honesty than a southern conservative could ever do. I understand, however, that more recently Genovese and his wife have found the Christian faith and drifted towards the culturally conservative Right.