Marxism and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D.

Genovese
Livingston, James, 1949Radical History Review, Issue 88, Winter 2004, pp. 30-48 (Article)

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GENOVESE FORUM

Marxism and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese
James Livingston

Marxism

The title of this essay should be Historiography R Us. Three years ago, Lloyd
Gardner urged me to participate in a roundtable discussion of William Appleman Williams at the Organization of American Historians conference along with Paul Buhle, Justus Doenecke, Patty Limerick, and Leo Ribuffo; a good time was had by all. Now here I am about to discuss Williamss counterpart, ally, and nemesis in the renaissance of Marxist scholarship, which began in the 1950s and became the mainstream of historical scholarship in the United States by the 1970s. Lets hope that we have as good a time, and that Bill and Gene will understand each other better in the historiographical hereafter.1 I want to start with my lack of credentials as a way of suggesting that Genoveses work has been and will remain important to historians as such, not merely to those who study nineteenth-century America. I am not an expert on antebellum southern history, although I do teach courses in which I have to explain the development of slavery. I am not an authority on Eugene Genovese, although, like most historians my age, I learned how to apply Marxist categories to the American archive by reading The Political Economy of Slavery, In Red and Black, The World the Slaveholders Madethis is still my favoriteand Roll, Jordan, Roll. More recently, I
Radical History Review Issue 88 (winter 2004): 3048 Copyright 2004 by MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.

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have sampled what might be called the later works, and have found them just as interesting if not as stimulating and methodologically transportable as the early works.2 Like everyone elses, my approach to Marx was determined by my prior encounter with avowed Marxists Genovese and Williams, to begin with, but also the canonical Brits of 1970s scholarship (Maurice Dobb, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, George Rude, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill) and of course my own teachers (Marvin Rosen, C. H. George, Alfred Young, Carl Parrini, and Martin Sklar) at Northern Illinois University, who assigned them. So I cannot claim to be an authority on Marxism, either, unless all we mean by that is the arguments over Marx that began in the late nineteenth century. At any rate, that is all I will mean by it: it just is the citation and resignication of Marxs texts permitted or determined in a word, mediated by subsequent interpretations of those texts. We cant peek over the edges of these interpretations as if they were not there, as if there were some inert, undeled, or transcendent text constituting the Marxism of Marx; all we can or should do in defense of Marxism, then, is to keep the conversation going about the Marxists we have put to use. Just like were doing today.3 By this pluralist accounting, the afliates of Marxism would include Georg Lukcs, Max Weber, Edward Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Michael Kalecki, Joan Robinson, William English Walling, E. R. A. Seligman, Samuel Gompers, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt Im thinking here of The Human Condition (1958) Heidi Hartmann, Lise Vogel, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler, as well as the more distant echoes heard in critical theory, and perhaps even the majority of people in the larger historical profession.4 These afliates typically assume or argue: 1. Civil society becomes critically signicant in modern Western civilization (and they get this from Hegels Philosophy of Right [1821], pars. 182256). Marxists are able, as a result, to claim that power, and the sources of historical change, cannot be construed as merely political or dynastic phenomena. They are also able to see that the site of self-discovery and self-government is society, not the polis, and not even, or exclusively, politics. Notice how liberal Marxists look from this Hegelian standpoint, and notice why modern social historians always sound vaguely Marxoid.5 2. The labor theory of value is indispensable in explaining how the exchange of equivalents between capital and labor produces an asymmetry of power. Like any other theory, however, whether in physics or in economics, it cannot be treated as a self-evident or transhistorical truth (that is why this theory had begun to produce more controversy than results by the early twentieth century, with the advent of what Marx called large industry). But the two-sector model of accumulation articulated in volume 2 of Capital, which I read as the historical elaboration of the theory of value, remains as an indispensable tool in explaining economic growth and business cycles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shorthand version of these

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technical claims that is, the implication of these theories or models is simply that economic change has social origins and political correlates.6 3. Capitalism is a necessary concept or periodizing device. It lets us understand the importance of a market in labor (the commodication of labor power) and the role of monetary representations in creating (not just revealing) such a market. Capitalism itself accordingly has an internal history, in which apparently diachronic moments like primitive accumulation, merchant capital, manufacture, modern industry, large industry, and modern credit acquire enormous synchronic signicance. The difference between capitalism and its immediate precursors, however dened, is neatly registered in the difference between the formula for capital (M-C-M1) and the similarly diagrammatic rendition of simple commodity circulation (C-M-C).7 4. Under capitalism, class supersedes or at least reshapes and regulates other principles of social organization such as kinship, estate, and so on, in part because commodity production and the capital-labor relation come to contain or determine more (and more) social relations as such. Social relations of goods production become the most signicant category in characterizing and periodizing civilizations, however, wherever the civilization in question might fall in the chronology of human society. Here Hegels conation of work and self-consciousness in chapter 4 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)He grasps labour as the essence of Man, as Marx put it in the Paris manuscripts of 1844-is the enabling insight and animating principle.8 5. Ideology or culture is worthy of historical investigation because it implicates and motivates all those who articulate or accept, without thinking, its ruling ideas. Such ideas are not reections or manifestations of other, material realities; they are themselves real and causative and have material effects. In any case, the area of an ideology or culture is proportionate, as Raymond Williams insisted, to the area of a language, not a class or a race or a gender, or, for that matter, a nation.9 Genovese is clearly a Marxist in these terms. But then so was Frederick Jackson Turner, who used the theories and ndings of Achille Loria, the Italian Marxist, to rewrite nineteenth-century American history as something more (or less) than the recapitulation of its European antecedents.10 Both have helped us to rethink the character and consequences of capitalism in the United States by studying exceptions to its rulein Turners case, the prehistory of class society transacted on the frontier; in Genoveses case, the negation of bourgeois individualism (as he would have it), market society, and capitalist culture enunciated by slaveholders and embedded in the Southern Tradition. Genoveses lifes work is soon to be consummated in The Mind of the Master Class, a book that will presumably elaborate on this apparently exceptional moment in modern Western historythe awkward moment of the successful slave republic in North Americaand that will probably address every question I ask hereafter. I

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nevertheless ask them as a way of getting at the political implications of the history he has written. Here they are, in two sets: (1) Is the slave South the antithesis or the extremity of bourgeois society? Is paternalism compromised by or specic to bourgeois society and its remnants, which would include the postbellum Southin other words, is bourgeois society the solvent or the support of paternalism? To put it as plainly as I can: Were the slaveholders the only Americans who fully accepted the implications of bourgeois individualism?11 (2) Why and how does an appreciation of the slave South underwrite Genoveses critique of contemporary culture? To put the same question another way, does his tactical embrace and deployment of the Southern Tradition become predictable or inevitable just as predictable or inevitable as, say, Michael Kazins tactical embrace and deployment of the populist persuasion insofar as he assumes the grim truth of the collapse of socialism, (these are his words) that is, insofar as he cannot see any actually existing alternative(s) to the moral decadence and social catastrophe of our time (again, his words)?12
Periodization These are not rhetorical questions. I am not trying to be merely provocative. Nor am I quibbling about an incidental adjective. Im trying to complicate both the historical periodization of capitalism and the political valence of Marxism in the hope that doing so will help us appreciate Genoveses scholarship and understand his political postures, past and present. But I would suggest at the outset that his present political postures cannot be faithfully characterized as conservative, and that, even if they could be so characterized in good faith, after Alexandre Kojve there is no dishonor in the designation of right-wing Marxist. Let me begin, then, with my short answer to the rst set of questions, each of which asks about the relation between bourgeois society, paternalism, and modern individualism. As the extremity of modern bourgeois society, I would claim, the slave South nourished both paternalism and bourgeois individualism. To make sense of this claim, that is, to make it arguable, we have to realize that capitalism and bourgeois society are not the same thing, and that most bourgeois (or proto-industrial) societies did not become capitalist civilizations. One way to clarify the distinction Im proposing is to enlist C. B. Macphersons idiom, wherein a simple market society corresponds to Marxs simple commodity circulation; in both versions, there are commodities and there are markets, but the purpose of commodity production is the validation of the self-mastering personality the genuine self as proprietor of his capacity to produce value through workand consumption construed as the acquisition of use values is the goal and the limit of production. Another way to clarify the distinction between bourgeois society and capitalism is to acknowledge the evidence adduced by Michael Merrill, James Henretta, Randolph Roth, Steven Hahn, and a host of othersincluding the Genoveses themselves with respect to the character and resilience of household economies in

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North America. By all accounts, these are market societies in which private property serves not only as the material foundation of the moral personalitys stability but also as an alienable commodity whose changing value determines and registers the vicissitudes of the self. By all accounts, moreover, these are market societies that function historically as the locus of resistance to the development of capitalism, that is, to what Karl Polanyi called the Great Transformation (what we now call the market revolution), through which primitive accumulation was completed and a market in labor was created.13 Yet another way to clarify the distinction in question is to note the nineteenthcentury transformation of the familyand thus of individualism as suchwhich is traced in womens history and feminist theory. The originating texts here, in my view, are those by Eli Zaretsky, Mary Ryan, Ellen Dubois, and Linda Nicholson. The conclusions to be drawn from their seminal work, and from later works that take their ndings for granted, are that the quintessentially bourgeois individual was the paterfamilias, the male head of household, the proprietor in every sense of the nuclear family and its attendant apprentices, servants, and slaves (whose social status and opportunities were quite similar until the late eighteenth century); and that this bourgeois individual gave way, in the course of the nineteenth-century market revolution, to a much more complex gure who entered society and participated in politics not as the bearer of familial roles and obligations but as an indeterminate set of social roles, an agenda of appetites. The exception to this rule was of course the slave South and its aftermaths, where the paternalism of the paterfamilias remained an ideological imperative even, or especially, in the industrializing areas of the latenineteenth-century piedmontthat is, where the household remained as the socialcultural bulwark against the encroachments of the new market in labor signied and caused by emancipation (the money economy signied and caused, as The Birth of a Nation makes clear, by two sides of the same coin: the Federal Army and the former slaves). Like a Family indeed.14 But what is at issue in pressing this distinction between bourgeois society and capitalism? I have three answers, which, in keeping with the interrogative mood of the occasion, I will pose as questions. First, is bourgeois society a transhistorical phenomenon? If so, the uncanny resemblance between the ancient and the early modern periods of Western civilization becomes remarkable enough to be subject to empirical tests along the lines Marilyn Arthur suggested many years ago certainly the return of the repressed republican tradition in the Machiavellian Moment looks less mysterious from this standpointand the anti-Weberian urge to dene capitalism as a suprahistorical, even universal sensibility or spirit becomes explicable.15 Second, does this distinction let us understand the opposition to capitalist accumulation which was, and is, generated from within, that is, from within the precincts and according to the principles of bourgeois society, from the Puritans to

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the Populists? If so, we might accredit the characterization of the slaveholders shared by Louis Hartz and James Oakes without dismissing or discounting or even disputing the very different characterization contained in Genoveses account of the very same social class. We might also begin to appreciate, rather than ridicule, the brooding nostalgia, the near desperate need for authentic experience, which animates so many contemporary critiques of capitalism.16 Third, does this distinction let us understand that a market society is not necessarily a capitalist societythat there are many variations on the theme of markets, and that if one of those variations is the antebellum slave South, another is the socialism that emerged in North America and elsewhere in the twentieth century? If so, we might reread Marxs remarks on the fetishism of commodities as an elaboration on the Theses on Feuerbach, and thus as an early version of the slogan invented by William Carlos Williams, the modernist poet and pragmatist: No ideas but in things. We might also rewrite the market revolution of the antebellum period that is, the transition from bourgeois society to capitalismalong the lines Thomas Haskell has suggested, as the social-intellectual premise of progress toward antislavery politics, and rethink the ambiguities of postindustrial society in the ways Daniel Bell and Martin Sklar have proposed. To do so would be to acknowledge the difference(s) capitalism made, for example between the grope of wealth, as Henry James summarized the spirit of capitalism, and the prot motive as Weber understood it. Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit, he insisted; capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.17 As I read it, this Weberian dictum has two implications, one histori(ographi)cal, the other methodological; both have political consequences, in my view, and, more to the point, both might help us appreciate what Genovese has been arguing as both an archivally accomplished professional historian and a profoundly pessimistic public intellectual. The histor(iographi)cal implication is that capitalism should be understood as a cross-class construction that emerges and evolves only insofar as its adherents are able to conne market forces to certain social spaces. In other words, capitalism cannot emerge from the constraints of a proto-industrial or simple market society unless wage laborers and their allies can establish clear limits on the scope of the commodity formunless they can specify and enforce a meaningful distinction between the value of their labor time and the worth of their lives. In the absence of this distinction, as Hegel noted, workers are slaves. That is why the most ferocious, popular, and effective critics of the antebellum South denounced slaveholders for treating human beings as if they were commodities to be bought and sold, soul by soul, but also welcomed what we call the market revolution as evidence of moral progress and noticed no contradiction or hypocrisy in their position because there was none.18

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The methodological implication of Webers dictum, again as I read it, is a warning against the equation of market values or imperatives, on the one hand, and capitalism as a mode of production, on the other. To see why it is a warning worth heeding, let us look at the political effects of this equation in Genoveses work. If I understand him correctly, Genovese assumes that any genuine alternative to capitalism requires the displacement rather than the socialization, modulation, or regulation of market forces (note that he here accepts the unitary denition of socialism offered by the Soviet experiment). In effect, then, he claims that a market society is by denition a capitalist society; certainly market socialism would be an oxymoron in his lexicon. The South had a market economy, as he puts it: it did not have an essentially market society, and the whole point of the defense of slavery in the abstract was to ensure that it did not develop one.19 Genovese also claims that if a critique of capitalism is not to be merely idealist, it must be issued from a social base that is exempt from market forces, or it must repudiate such forces in deeds as well as words as the South did in 1861. Compared to George Fitzhugh, he declares, most of the great conservative theorists and men of affairs in Europe and America were mere liberals. The difference between Burke or Tocqueville or Metternich, on the one hand, and Fitzhugh, on the other, was that the latter called for the utter destruction of the world capitalist system, and he could do so, according to Genovese, because he spoke from an appropriate social basefrom a world in which the fundamental social relations remained nonbourgeois. Thus there is no socialist radicalism worthy of the name in U.S. history because, since the fall of the house of slavery, the market has penetrated and mutilated every sphere of American social life. Meanwhile, there is no articulate conservatism (except perhaps the Southern Tradition) that does not remain within the orbit of market morality and, as a result, within the gravitational eld of capitalism. Moreover, the romanticism of the literati (e.g., of the Agrarians) embraces individualism and covertly endorses the liberal premises of the same morality. The only opposition to North American capitalism that ever combined ideological coherence and material consequences both words and deeds was, then, the opposition of the slave South: the exception to the exception, as it were.20
Politics The political impasse in which Genovese must therefore nd himself would be intolerable to most of us. Generally speaking, modern American historians maintain their critical stance toward the powers that be (whatever they may be) by positing a moment in the past when there was an opportunity to slow or to stop the juggernaut of capitalist accumulation, and thus to democratize American society. This moment functions as the historical origin of ethical-cum-political alternatives to the oligarchic present, that is, as the empirical evidence of such alternatives and thus as a good rea-

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son to keep hoping for deliverance from evil. Since the Progressive Era and the advent of so-called progressive historiography, the two moments that have most consistently served these purposes are the Populist-led revolt of the masses in the 1890s and the labor-led reforms of the 1930s. Genovese has his moment, to be sure, but he knows better than anyone that the mind of the master class offers no promise of moral or political redemption in the present just as Henry Adams knew better than anyone that the Jeffersonian moment he studied with such care was not a usable past. In the course of his prodigious research, each of these great historians decided that the democratization of American society was a hopeless dream, perhaps even an awful nightmare, and nally put his faith elsewhere, in a hereafter where time and place, cause and effect, can no longer matter, or in a heretofore where modernity conveniently disappears because it has not yet arrived. No wonder they appear to us as conservative critics of modern, corporate, bureaucratic capitalism in the United States.21 I would insist, however, that if we apply this political label to Genovese, we should be willing to do the same to the recent critics of consumer culture who have been similarly engaged in a search for genuine alternatives to commodity fetishism and hedonistic individualism, and who, like Genovese, have found these alternatives in the household economies and simple market societies of the nineteenth centurythat is, in the moral universe of bourgeois individualism. By the same token, we should be willing to acknowledge that an afliation with Marxism does not specify any political principle, position, or program on the left or for the left, except perhaps the priority of class struggle. As the Soviet debates of the 1920s suggest, and as the culture wars of the 1990s attest, the invocation of Marx and/or material realities and /or historical necessity does not produce a predictable political valence. We should be willing, accordingly, to recognize that overt opposition to capitalism can take reactionary political and cultural forms (a possibility emphasized in the 1950s by consensus historians and by intellectuals who attempted a theoretical specication of totalitarianism).22 And so we should also be willing to realize that the overt opposition to capitalism which goes by the name of socialism needs assessment and periodization in terms of political differentiation. For example, the schizophrenic mix of capitalism and socialism in the fascist experiments of the 1930s and 1940s was no less socialist (or capitalist) than the programs that amount to the New Deal. The difference between these approaches to the breakdown of markets and the reanimation of class struggle was clearly the liberal inheritance that had taught Americans to believe in the sovereignty of the people the supremacy of society over the state and to value individual identities achieved through association with others, usually in and through markets, rather than identities assigned by political criteria, ascribed by class standing, or determined by national origin. The socialism that exists (to this

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day) in the United States is equally liberal, and individualistic, and, yes, marketoriented. It has no particular social stratum or political party to convey its message, for, like its liberal (and republican) predecessors from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, it is a cross-class constructionthe working class, however dened, has no exclusive option on itand, again like its predecessors, it has developed out of doors, in civil society, as well as in the provinces of public policy, political platforms, and state power. But it is an actually existing social movement, and it represents an alternative to bourgeois individualism, to free markets, and to capitalism precisely because its adherents have repudiated neither individualism nor markets as such. In this sense, it still promises practical solutions to the social conicts (not catastrophe) and moral problems (not decadence) of our time. To acknowledge its existence in the here and now is not to claim that we can dispense with the study of American history, or that we already live in the best of all possible worlds; it is instead to claim that the principles in which we believe as socialists are legible in the circumstances (including markets) we study as historians, and that the democratization of American society is, therefore, not a hopeless dream but a live option, an impending possibility. It is evident yet unknown; but it is nonetheless real.23 The question that remains, even for those who dont share Genoveses sense of exile from the promise of American life, is whether this impending possibility is the political equivalent of Freddy Kruegeran awful nightmare that keeps us awake because it is too real, because its lacerating effects on intellectual honesty, personal privacy, and individual integrity must prove deadly. The question that remains is this: Does the democratization of American society mean merely majority rule, a circumstance in which all opinions are created equal, in which legitimate authority of any kind is therefore impossible, and in which the usurpation of individual rights or the annihilation of customary privileges cannot be opposed on rational grounds? Genovese seems to think so. In his usage, at any rate, the notion of democratization loses the ambiguous political connotations it had in Webers studies in bureaucracy and begins to carry the rhetorical weight that leveling had in eighteenth-century North America. Here is an example from The Southern Tradition:
Our institutions [churches and universities] are the closest thing we have to the historically evolved communities so dear to the hearts of traditionalists. They require governmental nurturing in a world increasingly dominated by corporate conglomerates that live easily with the cultural radicalism which threatens to bring all institutions and communities under the rule of a nationally numerical but economically powerless majority. The process of political centralization and democratization is strengtheningby no means weakeningan economic centralization that is indifferent to moral considerations.24

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Here is another: We may, if we wish, sneer at southern-conservative calls for piety and respect for natural law that is, for recognition that there are many things no regime has a right to do to people, no matter how wide and democratically constructed the consensus behind it. But it remains unclear that we have anything to put in their place. So democracy does signify mere majority rule, and this in turn must threaten the institutions and communities that have hitherto escaped or resisted the amoral grope of wealth which corporate conglomeration promotes: For if we dene the people as the majority of the country at large, with power over everything, then institutional and community autonomy cannot survive.25 Genovese is right, of course, but does this political syllogism make the sovereignty of the people government of, by, and for the people the problem? To answer, we need to understand the meaning and signicance of majority rule in popular government and to revisit his conclusion regarding the absence of alternatives to piety and natural law. We need, that is, to ask two more specic questions. First, is democracy reducible to majority rule? Second, is there nothing to put in the place of piety and natural law? If our answer to either question is yes, we have no good reasons to reject, or even to criticize, Genoveses political positions. But neither question can be adequately addressed without acknowledgment of the American constitutional tradition, which begins by asking both. It was the inveterately radical Thomas Jefferson, after all, who worried about the effects of an elective despotism and who endorsed James Madisons design of a political system that would blunt the force of majorities by making them more difcult to muster without reference to something other than a utilitarian calculus (the greatest good of the greatest number). In the 1780s, of course, many leaders and constituents of the revolution shared Jeffersons worries, but no one went as far as Madison in confronting the challenge to popular government represented by an impending elective despotismfor no one had more faith in popular government, and no one better understood the injustices imposed by majority rule.26 In Vices of the Political System of the United States, for example, a memorandum composed in April of 1787, Madison cited the multiplicity, the mutability, and the injustice of the laws passed by these states, but he devoted most of his energies to analyzing the problem of injustice; for, as he put it, if the multiplicity and mutability of laws prove a want of wisdom, their injustice betrays a defect still more alarming: more alarming not merely because it is a greater evil in itself, but because it brings more into question the fundamental principle of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such Governments, are the safest Guardians both of public Good and of private rights. He assumed that the defense of majority rule, and with it the possibility of a legitimate exercise of state power under popular forms of government, required a logic that was not circulara logic that did not justify the power of the state, as expressed in law, by reference to power as such, in this instance the power of numbers.27

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In sum, Madison knew that a majority could be as despotic as a tyrant. What was to be done? How to contain or combat this despotic potential and thus preserve the legitimacy of popular government? Neither a prudent regard for the common good nor respect for character was sufcient to the task, according to Madison. But piety was no help either, because, like other passions, it could easily iname oppressive majorities: The conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, the strongest of religious ties, proves that individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them under the like sanction, separately in their closets. When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other Passions, is increased by the sympathy of a multitude. So the way to establish a republic on enduring foundations was not to prevent but to prolong the process of majority formation, to devise, as Madison put it, such a modication of the Sovereignty as will render it sufciently neutral between the different interests and factions.28 In place of prudence and character that is, in place of what amounts to respect for natural law and piety, Madison proposed, then, to put the structural constraints of a constitution. By this I do not mean only that he proposed a limited government circumscribed by rights guaranteed to individuals or powers reserved to the states, as in the Bill of Rights, and enforced by a federal judiciary. I mean also that his constitutional design, his modication of the Sovereignty, inscribed a difference, and a debate, between what he called the two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons and the rights of property. It did so by adopting a middle mode through which the legislative branch was divided against itself, and each house became the effective (not the exclusive) voice of one of these cardinal objects. In this sense, Madison proposed to enlist historical time as the bulwark of justice he proposed to indenitely prolong the debate between the social classes that had already appeared, in the eighteenth century, as the bearers of these different rights.29 From his perspective, that is, from the perspective of the founders, popular government (in our terms, democracy) is neither reducible to, nor defensible as, mere majority rule, and neither natural law nor piety can serve as a constraint on the potential despotism of majorities. But I must admit that this citation of original intent works as a retort to Genoveses fear of democratization only insofar as the constitutional tradition Madison invented still informs contemporary political discourse, and, more particularly, only insofar as that tradition still informs the theories and practices of the American Left. In its absence, anything is possible because all we have is radicalismall we have is the sovereignty of the people narrowly construed as a numerical preponderance. All we have, in short, is the populist persuasion. To illustrate this claim, I turn again to Genoveses most poignant political meditation. In The Southern Tradition, the displacement of the constitutional tradition

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is enacted and registered in two ways. On the one hand, Genovese claims, contrary to the founders, that we have nothing to protect us against an elective despotism except piety and respect for natural lawas we have seen, any constitutional constraints on majority rule simply disappear in his account. On the other, he declares that the Yankee interpretation of the Constitution prevailed not because it was intellectually superior but because the North won a test of physical strength. The southern interpretation could never have prevailed, of course, because had the Confederacy won on the battleelds, it would have become a sovereign nation without legal authority in the remaining United States. But Genoveses statement does suggest either that what I have called the constitutional tradition has no intellectual integrityfor it is merely a matter of military power and majority rule or that the Supreme Courts infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which announced that the U.S. Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the federal territories, is as intellectually compelling as, say, Lincolns painstaking reply in the Cooper Union address of February 1860, which showed that a majority of the founders (those who actually composed the document, including Madison and Washington) assumed the Congress had the constitutional right to exclude slavery from the territories and that the Congress repeatedly exercised it, from the Northwest Ordinance to the Missouri Compromise.30 This displacement of the constitutional tradition allows for the mere radicalism of the antimonopoly tradition, which, here as elsewhere, would subordinate civil society to the state in the name of natural persons. In any event, I would argue that it leads Genovese toward a purely populist politics animated by a strenuously bourgeois individualism. For example, in afrming southern suspicions of nance capital and corporate-industrial power, he notes: Southern conservatism has always traced the evils of the modern world to the ascendancy of the prot motive and material acquisitiveness; to the conversion of small property based on individual labor into accumulated capital manifested as nancial assets; to centralization and bureaucratization of management; to the extreme specialization of labor and the rise of consumerism; to an idolatrous cult of economic growth and technological progress; and to the destructive exploitation of nature. Southern populism, from Tom Watson to George Wallace, always traced the evils of the twentieth century to the very same corporate sources; but then, since the 1960s, so has the larger American Left.31 The exquisite ironies of this intellectual convergence and political consensus are probably self-evident. I want nevertheless to spell them out because they may help us think about the future of the Left. First, the antimonopoly tradition as articulated in populist programs would accomplish what its advocates, including Genovese, apparently abhorit would produce statist command of civil society (political centralization, as he puts it), not institutional or community autonomy.32 Second, the American Lefts critical stance toward postindustrial, corporate-bureau-

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cratic capitalism is quite similar, generally speaking, to what Genovese sketches in The Southern Tradition because both parties assume that abstention from or excoriation of corporations and bureaucracies is the social-intellectual condition of political progress. So this Left should not hereafter deny him as one of its own. By the same token, Genovese should admit that the Left he has repudiated seems to share his desire to reinstate the moral universe specic to bourgeois society and individualism. But if I am correct to claim that each party has more in common with the other than either has acknowledged, the familiar distinction between radical and conservative needs rethinking. So, too, does the placement of the Left on the political spectrum dened by these extremes.
Notes
Too many people gave me good advice on this essay. There is no way to thank them all. But I must acknowledge the strong readings of Van Gosse, Eliza Reilly, Ronald Grele, James Oakes, Thomas Haskell, Will Jones, Bruce Robbins, Alex Lichtenstein, and Louis Ferleger. 1. See William Appleman Williams: A Roundtable, Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 275316. Those who doubt that Marxist scholarship became the mainstream in the 1970s should remember that the most inuential historians of the decade (at least with respect to American history) were Genovese, Williams, David Montgomery, and Herbert Gutman, and that Edmund Morgans great work of this period, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), was predicated on a close reading of C. B. Macpherson. 2. Genoveses early works include: The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1965); The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Vintage, 1969); In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: Vintage, 1971); Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1974). His later works include: Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), coauthored with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese; The Slaveholders Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 18201860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). A comprehensive bibliography of Genoveses principal works can be found in Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferleger, eds., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 21120. 3. Dobb, Williams, and Hill were much more important in my intellectual universe than Hobsbawm, Rude, and Thompsonthe icons of the new social historybut no matter how the inuence of these writers is eventually calculated, I would insist that Williams and Hill were the most gifted and accomplished scholars. For a defense of the mysterious text named the Marxism of Marx, see Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 19071922 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 4. This is not an exhaustive list: there can be no such thing. Even so, see Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971)note the citations of Weber on 9596; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; New York: Scribners, 1958); Eduard

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5.

6.

Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, trans. Edith C. Harvey (1899; New York: Schocken, 1961); Karl Kautsky, The Materialist Conception of History, trans. Raymond Meyer and John H. Kautsky (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (1951; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968); Michal Kalecki, Studies in the Theory of Business Cycles, 19331939, trans. Ada Kalecki (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966); Joan Robinson, Kalecki and Keynes, in Problems of Economic Dynamics and Planning: Essays in Honor of Michal Kalecki (Warsaw: PWN-Polich Scintic Publishers, 1964), 33541; Robinson, introduction to Accumulation of Capital, by Luxemburg, 1328; William English Walling, The Larger Aspects of Socialism (New York: Macmillan, 1913); Walling, The Pragmatism of Marx and Engels, New Review 1 (1913): 43439, 46469; E. R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907)note the respectful citation of and dissent from Achille Loria on 13536; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)note chap. 3; Heidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union, Capital and Class 8 (1979): 133; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)note chap. 7; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993)note 31, 250 n. 5. My inclusion of Gompers in this list of Marxists is determined by my reading of Stuart B. Kaufman, Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the AFL (Westport, CT.: Academic Press, 1975), and William B. Dick, Labor and Socialism in America: The Gompers Era (Port Washington: State University of New York Press, 1972), but also by many conversations over many years with Michael Merrill and Dorothy Sue Cobble. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), paragraphs 182256, 12255, and Additions on 26678; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 83111. But see also Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, trans. William McCuaig, ed. Nadia Urbinati (1930; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), for an illuminating and forceful argument against the position I have proposed herean argument that explains how the new utilitarians (the doctrinaire Marxists of the Second and Third International) renounced liberalism and why this move disarmed socialism by permitting statist command of civil society. In theory, Marxism does not exclude liberalism and/or individualism. In history, however, that is, in the early twentieth century, Marxists and fascists clearly collaborated in denouncing, if not discrediting, both liberalism and individualism. In this latter (historical) sense, Rossellis argument is quite compelling, and deeply disturbing. For an examination of the theory of value, and an application of the two-sector model, see James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 18501940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3118, 295337, esp. 1321 and 300301 n. 23. The transformation problem that agitated so many socialist writers in the early twentieth centuryhow do we get from the theory of value to average rates of prot, they asked, or, more prosaically, how do we reconcile volumes 1 and 3 of Capital?was one symptom of a larger paradigm shift through which the labor theory of value, like Newtonian physics, lost its explanatory adequacy circa 190020.

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

On the centrality of monetary representations in the transition to capitalism, see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols. (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 19069), 1:54185; the General Formula for Capital is the title and the topic of volume 1, part 2, chapter 4. For the periodization implied in volume 1, see Livingston, Pragmatism and Political Economy, 2140. On the signicance of modern banking and the credit system, see Marx, Capital, 3:434719. It is worth noting here that the Oxford English Dictionarys rst recorded reference to capitalism is from 1854 and that it occurs in a novel (by Thackery), not in a treatise on political economy. On the late appearance of class society as such, see Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Random House, 1968), chap. 4. A theoretical rationale for class analysis is attempted in James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 18901913 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), appendix B, 23846. See otherwise G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (1910; New York: Harper, 1967), 21844; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International, 1975), 229346, esp. 333; Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 370. See, for example, Georg Lukcs, Reication and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, in History and Class Consciousness, 83222; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). On the area of a culture, see Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Anchor, 1958), 340. When I uttered these words about Turners borrowings from Marx via Loria at the conference where this essay was rst presented, many people in the audience laughed; this response makes me think that Lee Bensons great book, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), has somehow been forgotten. My last question here is a paraphrase of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 80: As members of the national culture in particular and of the republic of letters in general, southerners drew upon the emerging bourgeois discourse to explain their own world to themselves. But they drew upon it selectively, and above all they never completely accepted the full implications of bourgeois individualism, much less the notion of the separation of home and work. This paraphrase is also a professional failinga transformation accomplished by imitationof the kind that Antonio Gramsci conjured when comparing medieval copyists to industrial workers under the regime of Fordism. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 30810. The question of paternalism is engaged most forcefully and productively in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, esp. book 1 and the appendix on 66165. See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Genovese quoted from Eugene D. Genovese and History: An Interview, in Paquette and Ferleger, Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, 203. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 4661. The debate on the household economy was started by Michael Merrills seminal essay Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufciency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States, Radical History Review 3.4 (1976):

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4271, and complicated by James A. Henretta, Families and Farms: Mentalit in Pre-industrial America, William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1980): 678700. Among the more important contributions to the debate are Randolph Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut Valley of Vermont, 17911850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 17801860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household. See also the brilliant use to which W. Fitzhugh Brundage puts Fox-Genoveses argument about the centrality of households in southern society in Lynching in the New South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 5871. And for the original version of our current claims about the market revolution, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944); but compare with Marx, Capital, 1:189 n. 1. 14. See Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 17901865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ellen Dubois, The Radicalism of the Womans Suffrage Movement, in Feminism and Equality, ed. Anne Phillips (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 12738; and Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Fitzhugh Brundages Lynching in the New South and John W. Cells The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) are among the works that suggest how signicant the household and the paterfamiliasthus gender as well as classwere to the new ideology of white supremacy which informed the rule of Jim Crow after 1890. In The Southern Tradition, Genovese notes that antebellum conservatives North and South focused on the individual freedom of the head of householdthat is, on the freedom of the propertied father or husband as against freedom for individuals as persons, or, what is the same thing, individuals without familial roles and obligations. He also notes in passing that this (bourgeois) principle of freedom continued to inform American conservatism long after the Civil War, even into the 1980s, when M. E. Bradford emerged as a vigorous spokesman of the Southern Tradition (see 1718, 69). Genovese had earlier shown that the defense of slavery was necessarily a defense of male supremacy within the family. See The World the Slaveholders Made, 195202. See also Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 18961920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chaps. 24; and Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Womens Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), chaps. 45. 15. See Marilyn Arthur, Liberated Women: The Classical Era, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1977), 6089, and Nicholson, Gender and History, 11521. See also James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001), 21920 n. 31, on the uncanny resemblance between the misogyny of the ancient and the early modern periods of Western civilization. Like many other historians, I used to think that the modern bourgeois specication of the relation between necessity and freedom represented a sharp break from the specications offered by ancient, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers. That is, I used to think that until the early modern

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age, the performance of socially necessary labor was incompatible with freedombefore then, those who did the necessary work were slaves or serfs, not men who were free because they were removed from the material imperatives of goods production. I am not so sure of this axiom anymore, and therefore I have risked asking whether bourgeois society is a transhistorical phenomenon. The books that determined my doubts are Ellen Meiksins-Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1987), and Claude Moss, The Ancient World at Work, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Norton, 1969), a volume in M. I. Finleys series. Meiksins-Wood argues persuasively that Athenian democracy was based on a small-holder economy, not slavery. Moss similarly argues that the essential basis for the ancient city was . . . a community of small farmers who were free and who owned their own land. Although the historical evolution of the Greek cities and of Rome soon changed this original social structure, nevertheless the citizen-soldier who owned his land remained the social ideal for antiquity (49). Or again: An estate could of course be divided into various units, and would comprise farms from several different districts in Attica. But the fact is that small estates of less than twenty-ve acres were the general rule, and these small estates were often farmed by the owner in person (54, my emphasis). In effect, Moss argues that if our goal is to understand the social basis of republican political theory and practice, we should pay more attention to Hesiod and less to Aristotle or Xenophon (see chap. 2). 16. There is more pathos than irony in the Puritans fear of the frontier and the free market. As R. H. Tawney argued many years ago, they inhabited a bourgeois society in which ownership of property (or wealth) permitted ownership of ones capacity to produce value through work; but in their view property (or wealth) was the means to the end of a self-mastering personalitya way of validating free willnot an end in itself. Thus the accumulation of property or the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself (the general formula for capital) inevitably appeared to them as the work of the devil. To my knowledge, historians and social theorists no longer dispute the simple fact that the Populists were thoroughly bourgeois individuals who believed in private property and in markets untainted by monopoly power or political corruption; they do, of course, debate the origins and effects of the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, but, with signicant exceptions such as Teresa Brennan, Lawrence Goodwyn, Michael Kazin, Elizabeth Sanders, and Roberto Unger, they do not prescribe the antimonopoly tradition as the cure for what ails us. See, for example, Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993), on the small business mode as a source of resistance to the world of large-scale production. See otherwise Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955), chaps. 67; and James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982), part 2. 17. See Marx, Capital, 1:8196; Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 400402; Thomas Haskell, Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, in The Antislavery Debate, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 10760; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Martin J. Sklar, The United States As a Developing Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. chaps. 1, 4, and 7. James is quoted from The American Scene (New York: Scribners, 1907), 159; Weber is quoted from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 17. 18. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, paragraph 67, 80 on 54, 63. On the contingencies of the transition from bourgeois society to capitalismthat is, on the improbability of the market revolutionsee Livingston, Pragmatism and Political Economy, chaps. 12.

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19. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 12531. 20. Ibid., 15458, 171, 23942. This same longing for an Archimedean point outside of the social relations specic to capitalist civilization still animates the scholarship of many inuential historians. For example, see Lawrence Goodwyn on the free social space supposedly afforded by the movement culture of populism in Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); and Jackson Lears on the clearing one apparently needs to gain critical distance from and proper perspective on the object of ones intellectual or artistic scrutiny, in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 21. On Henry Adams, the best work is forthcoming from Paul Bov, the editor of boundary 2; meanwhile, see John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and John Carlos Rowe, ed., New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. the brilliant piece by Howard Horwitz, The Education and the Salvation of History, 11556. 22. The critics of consumer culture I have in mind are William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), and Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance. There are many others, of course, but these two are the most visible and inuential among professional historians. For further discussion of their ideas, see Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, chap. 1. On the periodization of totalitarianism and the politics of consensus history, see Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), chaps. 67. In the culture wars of the 1990s, which I read as a struggle waged largely on the left, two of the most incendiary public textsone attacking the cultural politics of Social Text, the other attacking the feminist theories of Judith Butlerwere written by active and committed leftists, Alan Sokal and Martha Nussbaum, both of whom favored a much more strenuously materialist position than they ascribed to their ideological opponents. 23. On socialism as an actually existing dimension of American life, consult the seminal work of Martin J. Sklar, including Developing Country, chaps. 1, 7. The latest installment in his ongoing effort to discredit Werner Sombart is Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergence of Modern America: The Formative Era, in Reconstructing History, ed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: Routledge, 1999), 30421. See also Sidney Hooks introduction to Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, viixx, esp. xvi: Democratic socialists today are aware that socialism and capitalism as systems of economy are neither exhaustive of all possibilities nor exclusive of each other . . . [and] they deny therefore that the chief issue of our time is between socialism and capitalism. See also Bernsteins remarks on socialism as the heir to liberalism in ibid., 14853. 24. Genovese, Southern Tradition, 97 (my emphasis); hereafter cited as ST. Webers ambiguities with respect to bureaucracy can be sampled in Bureaucracy, in From Max Weber, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 196244, esp. 23840. 25. ST, 100, 95 (my emphasis). See also note 27 below. 26. On the political/intellectual crisis of the 1780sthe critical periodsee Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 17761787 (New York: Norton, 1969), chaps. 711. See also Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic (New York: Norton, 1980), 90132. 27. James Madison, Vices of the Political System of the United States, in The Mind of the Founder, ed. Marvin Meyers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 88. On the problem of majority rule, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 16568; and

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28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 6378. Harry Jaffa treats this problem as the contradiction between the imperatives of equality and consent embodied in the Declaration of Independence. See his Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), chap. 17. A more recent meditation on the very same problem, but one that deploys a theoretical idiom that strongly resembles Genovesesand thus reduces the meaning of democracy to majority ruleis Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003). Madison, Vices, 8991. See Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 10814, where Madisons design is discussed in more detail. ST, 28. Lincolns speech of February 27, 1860, is replicated in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 3:52250. See also the speech of June 26, 1857, on the Dred Scott decision, 2:398410. ST, 34 (my emphasis). On the American lefts populist proclivities, see Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, chaps. 12, 4, and 6. That the antimonopoly tradition tends toward statism is demonstrated in Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 18901916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 12745.