Marxism and the Politics in History Reflexions on Genovese

“Marxism” and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Workof Eugene D. Genovese

Livingston, James, 1949-

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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, LloydGardner urged me to participate in a roundtable discussion of William ApplemanWilliams at the Organization of American Historians conference along with PaulBuhle, Justus Doenecke, Patty Limerick, and Leo Ribuffo; a good time was had byall. Now here I am about to discuss Williams’s counterpart, ally, and nemesis in therenaissance of Marxist scholarship, which began in the 1950s and became the main-stream of historical scholarship in the United States by the 1970s. Let’s hope that wehave as good a time, and that Bill and Gene will understand each other better in thehistoriographical hereafter.1

I want to start with my lack of credentials as a way of suggesting that Gen-ovese’s work has been and will remain important to historians as such, not merely tothose who study nineteenth-century America. I am not an expert on antebellumsouthern history, although I do teach courses in which I have to explain the devel-opment of slavery. I am not an authority on Eugene Genovese, although, like mosthistorians my age, I learned how to apply Marxist categories to the American archiveby reading The Political Economy of Slavery, In Red and Black, The World theSlaveholders Made—this is still my favorite—and Roll, Jordan, Roll. More recently, I

Radical History ReviewIssue 88 (winter 2004): 30–48Copyright 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 inter-esting if not as stimulating and methodologically transportable as the “early works.”2

Like everyone else’s, my approach to Marx was determined by my priorencounter with avowed Marxists—Genovese and Williams, to begin with, but alsothe canonical Brits of 1970s scholarship (Maurice Dobb, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P.Thompson, George Rude, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill) and of course myown teachers (Marvin Rosen, C. H. George, Alfred Young, Carl Parrini, and MartinSklar) at Northern Illinois University, who assigned them. So I cannot claim to be anauthority on “Marxism,” either, unless all we mean by that is the arguments overMarx that began in the late nineteenth century. At any rate, that is all I will mean byit: it just is the citation and resignification of Marx’s texts permitted or determined—in a word, mediated—by subsequent interpretations of those texts. We can’t peekover the edges of these interpretations as if they were not there, as if there weresome inert, undefiled, or transcendent text constituting the “Marxism of Marx”; allwe can or should do in defense of “Marxism,” then, is to keep the conversation goingabout the Marxists we have put to use. Just like we’re doing today.3

By this pluralist accounting, the affiliates of “Marxism” would include GeorgLukács, Max Weber, Edward Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, MichaelKalecki, Joan Robinson, William English Walling, E. R. A. Seligman, Samuel Gom-pers, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt—I’m thinking here of The Human Condi-tion (1958)—Heidi Hartmann, Lise Vogel, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler, aswell as the more distant echoes heard in critical theory, and perhaps even the major-ity of people in the larger historical profession.4 These affiliates typically assume orargue:

1. Civil society becomes critically significant in modern Western civilization(and they get this from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1821], pars. 182–256). Marxistsare able, as a result, to claim that power, and the sources of historical change, cannotbe construed as merely political or dynastic phenomena. They are also able to seethat the site of self-discovery and self-government is society, not the polis, and noteven, or exclusively, politics. Notice how “liberal” Marxists look from this Hegelianstandpoint, and notice why modern social historians always sound vaguely Marxoid.5

2. The labor theory of value is indispensable in explaining how the exchangeof equivalents between capital and labor produces an asymmetry of power. Like anyother theory, however, whether in physics or in economics, it cannot be treated as aself-evident or transhistorical truth (that is why this theory had begun to producemore controversy than results by the early twentieth century, with the advent of whatMarx called “large industry”). But the two-sector model of accumulation articulatedin volume 2 of Capital, which I read as the historical elaboration of the theory ofvalue, remains as an indispensable tool in explaining economic growth and businesscycles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shorthand version of these

Livingston | “Marxism” and the Politics of History 31


“technical” claims—that is, the implication of these theories or models—is simplythat economic change has social origins and political correlates.6

3. Capitalism is a necessary concept or periodizing device. It lets us under-stand the importance of a market in labor (the commodification of labor power) andthe role of monetary representations in creating (not just revealing) such a market.Capitalism itself accordingly has an “internal” history, in which apparently diachronicmoments like “primitive accumulation,” “merchant capital,” “manufacture,” “modernindustry,” “large industry,” and “modern credit” acquire enormous synchronicsignificance. The difference between capitalism and its immediate precursors, how-ever defined, is neatly registered in the difference between the “formula for capital” (M-C-M1) and the similarly diagrammatic rendition of simple commodity circula-tion (C-M-C).7

4. Under capitalism, class supersedes or at least reshapes and regulates otherprinciples of social organization such as kinship, estate, and so on, in part becausecommodity production and the capital-labor relation come to contain or determinemore (and more) social relations as such. Social relations of goods productionbecome the most significant category in characterizing and periodizing civilizations,however, wherever the civilization in question might fall in the chronology of humansociety. Here Hegel’s conflation of work and self-consciousness in chapter 4 of ThePhenomenology of Spirit (1807)—“He grasps labour as the essence of Man,” as Marxput it in the Paris manuscripts of 1844–-is the enabling insight and animating prin-ciple.8

5. Ideology or culture is worthy of historical investigation because it impli-cates and motivates all those who articulate or accept, without thinking, its “rulingideas.” Such ideas are not reflections or manifestations of other, “material” realities;they are themselves real and causative and have material effects. In any case, thearea of an ideology or culture is proportionate, as Raymond Williams insisted, to thearea 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 Jack-son Turner, who used the theories and findings of Achille Loria, the Italian Marxist,to rewrite nineteenth-century American history as something more (or less) than therecapitulation of its European antecedents.10 Both have helped us to rethink thecharacter and consequences of capitalism in the United States by studying excep-tions to its rule—in Turner’s case, the prehistory of class society transacted on “the”frontier; in Genovese’s case, the negation of “bourgeois individualism” (as he wouldhave it), market society, and capitalist culture enunciated by slaveholders andembedded in the “Southern Tradition.”

Genovese’s life’s work is soon to be consummated in The Mind of the MasterClass, a book that will presumably elaborate on this apparently exceptional momentin modern Western history—the awkward moment of the successful slave republicin North America—and that will probably address every question I ask hereafter. I

32 Radical History Review


nevertheless ask them as a way of getting at the political implications of the historyhe has written. Here they are, in two sets: (1) Is the slave South the antithesis or theextremity of bourgeois society? Is paternalism compromised by or specific to bour-geois society and its remnants, which would include the postbellum South—in otherwords, is bourgeois society the solvent or the support of paternalism? To put it asplainly as I can: Were the slaveholders the only Americans who fully accepted theimplications of bourgeois individualism?11 (2) Why and how does an appreciation ofthe slave South underwrite Genovese’s critique of contemporary culture? To put thesame question another way, does his tactical embrace and deployment of the “South-ern Tradition” become predictable or inevitable—just as predictable or inevitableas, say, Michael Kazin’s tactical embrace and deployment of the “populist persua-sion”—insofar as he assumes the “grim truth” of the “collapse of socialism,” (theseare his words) that is, insofar as he cannot see any actually existing alternative(s) tothe “moral decadence and social catastrophe of our time” (again, his words)?12

PeriodizationThese are not rhetorical questions. I am not trying to be merely provocative. Nor amI quibbling about an incidental adjective. I’m trying to complicate both the histori-cal periodization of capitalism and the political valence of “Marxism” in the hope thatdoing so will help us appreciate Genovese’s scholarship and understand his politicalpostures, past and present. But I would suggest at the outset that his present politi-cal postures cannot be faithfully characterized as “conservative,” and that, even ifthey could be so characterized in good faith, after Alexandre Kojève there is no dis-honor in the designation of “right-wing Marxist.”

Let me begin, then, with my short answer to the first set of questions, eachof which asks about the relation between bourgeois society, paternalism, and mod-ern individualism. As the extremity of modern bourgeois society, I would claim, theslave South nourished both paternalism and bourgeois individualism. To make senseof this claim, that is, to make it arguable, we have to realize that capitalism and bour-geois society are not the same thing, and that most bourgeois (or proto-industrial)societies did not become capitalist civilizations. One way to clarify the distinctionI’m proposing is to enlist C. B. Macpherson’s idiom, wherein a “simple market soci-ety” corresponds to Marx’s simple commodity circulation; in both versions, there arecommodities and there are markets, but the purpose of commodity production is thevalidation of the self-mastering personality—the genuine self as proprietor of hiscapacity to produce value through work—and consumption construed as the acqui-sition of use values is the goal and the limit of production.

Another way to clarify the distinction between bourgeois society and capital-ism is to acknowledge the evidence adduced by Michael Merrill, James Henretta,Randolph Roth, Steven Hahn, and a host of others—including the Genoveses them-selves—with respect to the character and resilience of household economies in



North America. By all accounts, these are market societies in which private propertyserves not only as the material foundation of the moral personality’s stability but alsoas an alienable commodity whose changing value determines and registers the “vicis-situdes of the self.” By all accounts, moreover, these are market societies that func-tion historically as the locus of resistance to the development of capitalism, that is, towhat Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation” (what we now call the marketrevolution), through which primitive accumulation was completed and a market inlabor was created.13

Yet another way to clarify the distinction in question is to note the nineteenth-century transformation of the family—and thus of individualism as such—which istraced in women’s history and feminist theory. The originating texts here, in my view,are those by Eli Zaretsky, Mary Ryan, Ellen Dubois, and Linda Nicholson. The con-clusions to be drawn from their seminal work, and from later works that take theirfindings for granted, are that the quintessentially bourgeois individual was the pater-familias, the male head of household, the proprietor—in every sense—of thenuclear family and its attendant apprentices, “servants,” and slaves (whose social sta-tus and opportunities were quite similar until the late eighteenth century); and thatthis bourgeois individual gave way, in the course of the nineteenth-century “marketrevolution,” to a much more complex figure who entered society and participated inpolitics not as the bearer of familial roles and obligations but as an indeterminate setof social roles, an agenda of appetites. The exception to this rule was of course theslave South and its aftermaths, where the paternalism of the paterfamilias remainedan ideological imperative even, or especially, in the industrializing areas of the late-nineteenth-century piedmont—that is, where the household remained as the social-cultural bulwark against the encroachments of the new market in labor signified andcaused by emancipation (the money economy signified and caused, as The Birth of aNation makes clear, by two sides of the same coin: the Federal Army and the formerslaves). “Like a Family” indeed.14

But what is at issue in pressing this distinction between bourgeois society andcapitalism? I have three answers, which, in keeping with the interrogative mood ofthe occasion, I will pose as questions. First, is bourgeois society a transhistorical phe-nomenon? If so, the uncanny resemblance between the ancient and the early modernperiods of Western civilization becomes remarkable enough to be subject to empiri-cal tests along the lines Marilyn Arthur suggested many years ago—certainly thereturn of the repressed republican tradition in the “Machiavellian Moment” looks lessmysterious from this standpoint—and the anti-Weberian urge to define capitalism asa suprahistorical, even universal sensibility or “spirit” becomes explicable.15

Second, does this distinction let us understand the opposition to capitalistaccumulation which was, and is, generated “from within,” that is, from within theprecincts and according to the principles of bourgeois society, from the Puritans to



the Populists? If so, we might accredit the characterization of the slaveholdersshared by Louis Hartz and James Oakes without dismissing or discounting or evendisputing the very different characterization contained in Genovese’s account of thevery same social class. We might also begin to appreciate, rather than ridicule, thebrooding nostalgia, the near desperate need for “authentic experience,” which ani-mates so many contemporary critiques of capitalism.16

Third, does this distinction let us understand that a market society is not nec-essarily a capitalist society—that there are many variations on the theme of markets,and that if one of those variations is the antebellum slave South, another is the social-ism that emerged in North America and elsewhere in the twentieth century? If so,we might reread Marx’s remarks on the “fetishism of commodities” as an elaborationon the “Theses on Feuerbach,” and thus as an early version of the slogan inventedby William Carlos Williams, the modernist poet and pragmatist: “No ideas but inthings.” We might also rewrite the “market revolution” of the antebellum period—that is, the transition from bourgeois society to capitalism—along the lines ThomasHaskell has suggested, as the social-intellectual premise of progress toward antislav-ery politics, and rethink the ambiguities of postindustrial society in the ways DanielBell and Martin Sklar have proposed. To do so would be to acknowledge the differ-ence(s) capitalism made, for example between the “grope of wealth,” as Henry Jamessummarized the spirit of capitalism, and the profit motive as Weber understood it.“Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still lessits spirit,” he insisted; “capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at leasta 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, moreto the point, both might help us appreciate what Genovese has been arguing as bothan archivally accomplished professional historian and a profoundly pessimistic pub-lic intellectual. The histor(iographi)cal implication is that capitalism should beunderstood as a cross-class construction that emerges and evolves only insofar as itsadherents are able to confine market forces to certain social spaces. In other words,capitalism cannot emerge from the constraints of a proto-industrial or simple marketsociety unless wage laborers and their allies can establish clear limits on the scopeof the commodity form—unless they can specify and enforce a meaningful distinc-tion between the value of their labor time and the worth of their lives. In the absenceof this distinction, as Hegel noted, workers are slaves. That is why the most ferocious,popular, and effective critics of the antebellum South denounced slaveholders fortreating human beings as if they were commodities to be bought and sold, “soul bysoul,” but also welcomed what we call the “market revolution” as evidence of moralprogress and noticed no contradiction or hypocrisy in their position because therewas none.18



The methodological implication of Weber’s dictum, again as I read it, is awarning against the equation of market values or imperatives, on the one hand, andcapitalism as a mode of production, on the other. To see why it is a warning worthheeding, let us look at the political effects of this equation in Genovese’s work. If Iunderstand him correctly, Genovese assumes that any genuine alternative to capi-talism requires the displacement rather than the socialization, modulation, or regu-lation of market forces (note that he here accepts the unitary definition of socialismoffered by the Soviet experiment). In effect, then, he claims that a market society isby definition a capitalist society; certainly market socialism would be an oxymoron inhis lexicon. “The South had a market economy,” as he puts it: “it did not have anessentially market society, and the whole point of the defense of slavery in theabstract was to ensure that it did not develop one.”19

Genovese also claims that if a critique of capitalism is not to be merely “ide-alist,” it must be issued from a “social base” that is exempt from market forces, or itmust 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 theoristsand men of affairs in Europe and America were mere liberals.” The differencebetween Burke or Tocqueville or Metternich, on the one hand, and Fitzhugh, on theother, was that the latter “called for the utter destruction of the world capitalist sys-tem,” and he could do so, according to Genovese, “because he spoke from an appro-priate social base—from a world in which the fundamental social relations remainednonbourgeois.” Thus there is no socialist radicalism worthy of the name in U.S. his-tory because, since the fall of the house of slavery, the market has penetrated andmutilated every sphere of American social life. Meanwhile, there is no articulate con-servatism (except perhaps the Southern Tradition) that does not remain within theorbit of “market morality” and, as a result, within the gravitational field of capitalism.Moreover, the romanticism of the literati (e.g., of the Agrarians) embraces individu-alism and covertly endorses the “liberal” premises of the same morality. The onlyopposition to North American capitalism that ever combined ideological coherenceand material consequences—both words and deeds—was, then, the opposition ofthe slave South: the exception to the exception, as it were.20

PoliticsThe political impasse in which Genovese must therefore find himself would be intol-erable to most of us. Generally speaking, modern American historians maintain theircritical stance toward the powers that be (whatever they may be) by positing amoment in the past when there was an opportunity to slow or to stop the juggernautof capitalist accumulation, and thus to democratize American society. This momentfunctions as the historical origin of ethical-cum-political alternatives to the oligarchicpresent, that is, as the empirical evidence of such alternatives and thus as a good rea-



son to keep hoping for deliverance from evil. Since the Progressive Era and theadvent of so-called progressive historiography, the two moments that have most con-sistently served these purposes are the Populist-led revolt of the masses in the 1890sand the labor-led reforms of the 1930s. Genovese has his “moment,” to be sure, buthe knows better than anyone that the mind of the master class offers no promise ofmoral or political redemption in the present—just as Henry Adams knew betterthan anyone that the Jeffersonian moment he studied with such care was not ausable past. In the course of his prodigious research, each of these great historiansdecided that the democratization of American society was a hopeless dream, perhapseven an awful nightmare, and finally put his faith elsewhere, in a hereafter wheretime and place, cause and effect, can no longer matter, or in a heretofore wheremodernity conveniently disappears because it has not yet arrived. No wonder theyappear to us as “conservative” critics of modern, corporate, bureaucratic capitalismin the United States.21

I would insist, however, that if we apply this political label to Genovese, weshould be willing to do the same to the recent critics of consumer culture who havebeen similarly engaged in a search for genuine alternatives to commodity fetishismand hedonistic individualism, and who, like Genovese, have found these alternativesin the household economies and simple market societies of the nineteenth cen-tury—that is, in the moral universe of bourgeois individualism. By the same token,we should be willing to acknowledge that an affiliation with “Marxism” does notspecify any political principle, position, or program on the left or for the left, exceptperhaps the priority of class struggle. As the Soviet debates of the 1920s suggest, andas the “culture wars” of the 1990s attest, the invocation of Marx and/or “material real-ities” and/or “historical necessity” does not produce a predictable political valence.We should be willing, accordingly, to recognize that overt opposition to capitalismcan take reactionary political and cultural forms (a possibility emphasized in the1950s by “consensus” historians and by intellectuals who attempted a theoreticalspecification of totalitarianism).22

And so we should also be willing to realize that the overt opposition to capi-talism which goes by the name of socialism needs assessment and periodization interms of political differentiation. For example, the schizophrenic mix of capitalismand 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 differencebetween these approaches to the breakdown of markets and the reanimation of classstruggle was clearly the liberal inheritance that had taught Americans to believe inthe “sovereignty of the people”—the supremacy of society over the state—and tovalue individual identities achieved through association with others, usually in andthrough markets, rather than identities assigned by political criteria, ascribed byclass standing, or determined by national origin. The socialism that exists (to this



day) in the United States is equally liberal, and individualistic, and, yes, “market-oriented.” 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 construction—the working class, howeverdefined, has no exclusive option on it—and, again like its predecessors, it has devel-oped “out of doors,” in civil society, as well as in the provinces of public policy, polit-ical platforms, and state power. But it is an actually existing social movement, and itrepresents an alternative to bourgeois individualism, to “free markets,” and to capi-talism precisely because its adherents have repudiated neither individualism normarkets as such. In this sense, it still promises practical solutions to the socialconflicts (not catastrophe) and moral problems (not decadence) of our time. Toacknowledge its existence in the here and now is not to claim that we can dispensewith the study of American history, or that we already live in the best of all possibleworlds; it is instead to claim that the principles in which we believe as socialists arelegible in the circumstances (including markets) we study as historians, and that thedemocratization of American society is, therefore, not a hopeless dream but a liveoption, an impending possibility. It is evident yet unknown; but it is nonethelessreal.23

The question that remains, even for those who don’t share Genovese’s senseof exile from the promise of American life, is whether this impending possibility isthe political equivalent of Freddy Krueger—an awful nightmare that keeps us awakebecause it is too real, because its lacerating effects on intellectual honesty, personalprivacy, and individual integrity must prove deadly. The question that remains is this:Does the democratization of American society mean merely majority rule, a cir-cumstance in which all opinions are created equal, in which legitimate authority ofany kind is therefore impossible, and in which the usurpation of individual rights orthe annihilation of customary privileges cannot be opposed on rational grounds?Genovese seems to think so. In his usage, at any rate, the notion of democratizationloses the ambiguous political connotations it had in Weber’s studies in bureaucracyand begins to carry the rhetorical weight that leveling had in eighteenth-centuryNorth America. Here is an example from The Southern Tradition:

Our institutions [churches and universities] are the closest thing we have to thehistorically evolved communities so dear to the hearts of traditionalists. Theyrequire governmental nurturing in a world increasingly dominated by corporateconglomerates that live easily with the cultural radicalism which threatens tobring all institutions and communities under the rule of a nationally numericalbut economically powerless majority. The process of political centralization anddemocratization is strengthening—by no means weakening—an economiccentralization that is indifferent to moral considerations.24



Here is another: “We may, if we wish, sneer at southern-conservative calls for pietyand respect for natural law—that is, for recognition that there are many things noregime has a right to do to people, no matter how wide and democratically con-structed the consensus behind it. But it remains unclear that we have anything to putin their place.” So “democracy” does signify mere majority rule, and this in turn mustthreaten the institutions and communities that have hitherto escaped or resisted theamoral grope of wealth which corporate conglomeration promotes: “For if we define‘the people’ as the majority of the country at large, with power over everything, theninstitutional and community autonomy cannot survive.”25

Genovese is right, of course, but does this political syllogism make the sov-ereignty of the people—government of, by, and for the people—the problem? Toanswer, we need to understand the meaning and significance of majority rule in pop-ular government and to revisit his conclusion regarding the absence of alternativesto piety and natural law. We need, that is, to ask two more specific questions. First,is democracy reducible to majority rule? Second, is there nothing to put in the placeof piety and natural law? If our answer to either question is yes, we have no good rea-sons to reject, or even to criticize, Genovese’s political positions.

But neither question can be adequately addressed without acknowledgmentof the American constitutional tradition, which begins by asking both. It was theinveterately radical Thomas Jefferson, after all, who worried about the effects of an“elective despotism” and who endorsed James Madison’s design of a political systemthat would blunt the force of majorities by making them more difficult to musterwithout reference to something other than a utilitarian calculus (“the greatest goodof the greatest number”). In the 1780s, of course, many leaders and constituents ofthe revolution shared Jefferson’s worries, but no one went as far as Madison in con-fronting the challenge to popular government represented by an impending “elec-tive despotism”—for no one had more faith in popular government, and no one bet-ter understood the injustices imposed by majority rule.26

In “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” for example, a memo-randum 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 ener-gies to analyzing the problem of injustice; for, as he put it, “if the multiplicity andmutability of laws prove a want of wisdom, their injustice betrays a defect still morealarming: more alarming not merely because it is a greater evil in itself, but becauseit brings more into question the fundamental principle of republican Government,that the majority who rule in such Governments, are the safest Guardians both ofpublic 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 formsof government, required a logic that was not circular—a logic that did not justify thepower of the state, as expressed in law, by reference to power as such, in this instancethe power of numbers.27



In sum, Madison knew that a majority could be as despotic as a tyrant. Whatwas to be done? How to contain or combat this despotic potential and thus preservethe legitimacy of popular government? Neither a “prudent regard” for the commongood nor “respect for character” was sufficient to the task, according to Madison. Butpiety was no help either, because, like other “passions,” it could easily inflameoppressive majorities: “The conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, thestrongest of religious ties, proves that individuals join without remorse in acts againstwhich their consciences would revolt if proposed to them under the like sanction,separately in their closets. When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, itsforce like that of other Passions, is increased by the sympathy of a multitude.” So theway to establish a republic on enduring foundations was not to prevent but toprolong the process of majority formation, to devise, as Madison put it, “such amodification of the Sovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the dif-ferent interests and factions.”28

In place of prudence and character—that is, in place of what amounts torespect for natural law—and piety, Madison proposed, then, to put the structuralconstraints of a constitution. By this I do not mean only that he proposed a “limitedgovernment” circumscribed by rights guaranteed to individuals or powers reservedto the states, as in the Bill of Rights, and enforced by a federal judiciary. I mean alsothat his constitutional design, his “modification of the Sovereignty,” inscribed a dif-ference, and a debate, between what he called “the two cardinal objects of Govern-ment, the rights of persons and the rights of property.” It did so by adopting a “mid-dle mode” through which the legislative branch was divided against itself, and eachhouse 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 indefinitely prolong the debate between the social classes that had already appeared, in the eighteenth century, as the bearers of these differentrights.29

From his perspective, that is, from the perspective of the founders, populargovernment (in our terms, democracy) is neither reducible to, nor defensible as, meremajority rule, and neither natural law nor piety can serve as a constraint on the poten-tial despotism of majorities. But I must admit that this citation of “original intent”works as a retort to Genovese’s fear of “democratization” only insofar as the constitu-tional tradition Madison invented still informs contemporary political discourse, and,more particularly, only insofar as that tradition still informs the theories and practicesof the American Left. In its absence, anything is possible because all we have is rad-icalism—all we have is the sovereignty of the people narrowly construed as a numer-ical preponderance. All we have, in short, is the populist persuasion. To illustrate thisclaim, I turn again to Genovese’s most poignant political meditation.

In The Southern Tradition, the displacement of the constitutional tradition



is enacted and registered in two ways. On the one hand, Genovese claims, contrary tothe founders, that we have nothing to protect us against an “elective despotism” exceptpiety and respect for natural law—as we have seen, any constitutional constraints onmajority rule simply disappear in his account. On the other, he declares that “theYankee interpretation of the Constitution prevailed not because it was intellectuallysuperior but because the North won a test of physical strength.” The southern inter-pretation could never have prevailed, of course, because had the Confederacy wonon the battlefields, it would have become a sovereign nation without legal authorityin the remaining United States. But Genovese’s statement does suggest either thatwhat I have called the constitutional tradition has no intellectual integrity—for it ismerely a matter of military power and majority rule—or that the Supreme Court’sinfamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which announced that the U.S. Congress hadno right to exclude slavery from the federal territories, is as intellectually compellingas, say, Lincoln’s painstaking reply in the Cooper Union address of February 1860,which showed that a majority of the founders (those who actually composed the doc-ument, including Madison and Washington) assumed the Congress had the consti-tutional right to exclude slavery from the territories and that the Congress repeat-edly exercised it, from the Northwest Ordinance to the Missouri Compromise.30

This displacement of the constitutional tradition allows for the mere radical-ism of the antimonopoly tradition, which, here as elsewhere, would subordinate civilsociety to the state in the name of “natural persons.” In any event, I would argue thatit leads Genovese toward a purely populist politics animated by a strenuously bour-geois individualism. For example, in affirming southern suspicions of finance capi-tal and corporate-industrial power, he notes: “Southern conservatism has alwaystraced the evils of the modern world to the ascendancy of the profit motive andmaterial acquisitiveness; to the conversion of small property based on individuallabor into accumulated capital manifested as financial assets; to centralization andbureaucratization of management; to the extreme specialization of labor and the riseof consumerism; to an idolatrous cult of economic growth and technologicalprogress; and to the destructive exploitation of nature.” Southern populism, fromTom Watson to George Wallace, always traced the evils of the twentieth century tothe very same corporate sources; but then, since the 1960s, so has the larger Ameri-can Left.31

The exquisite ironies of this intellectual convergence and political consensusare probably self-evident. I want nevertheless to spell them out because they mayhelp us think about the future of the Left. First, the antimonopoly tradition as artic-ulated in populist programs would accomplish what its advocates, including Gen-ovese, apparently abhor—it would produce statist command of civil society (“polit-ical centralization,” as he puts it), not institutional or community autonomy.32

Second, the American Left’s critical stance toward postindustrial, corporate-bureau-



cratic capitalism is quite similar, generally speaking, to what Genovese sketches inThe Southern Tradition because both parties assume that abstention from or exco-riation of corporations and bureaucracies is the social-intellectual condition of polit-ical progress. So this Left should not hereafter deny him as one of its own. By thesame token, Genovese should admit that the Left he has repudiated seems to sharehis desire to reinstate the moral universe specific to bourgeois society and individu-alism. But if I am correct to claim that each party has more in common with theother than either has acknowledged, the familiar distinction between “radical” and“conservative” needs rethinking. So, too, does the placement of the Left on the polit-ical spectrum defined by these extremes.

NotesToo many people gave me good advice on this essay. There is no way to thank them all. But Imust 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): 275–316.

Those who doubt that Marxist scholarship became the mainstream in the 1970s shouldremember that the most influential historians of the decade (at least with respect toAmerican history) were Genovese, Williams, David Montgomery, and Herbert Gutman, andthat Edmund Morgan’s great work of this period, American Slavery, American Freedom:The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), was predicated on a closereading of C. B. Macpherson.

2. Genovese’s 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 BourgeoisProperty in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press,1983), coauthored with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese; The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom andProgress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of SouthCarolina Press, 1991); The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of anAmerican Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). A comprehensivebibliography of Genovese’s “principal works” can be found in Robert Louis Paquette andLouis A. Ferleger, eds., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 2000), 211–20.

3. Dobb, Williams, and Hill were much more important in my intellectual universe thanHobsbawm, Rude, and Thompson—the icons of the “new social history”—but no matterhow the influence of these writers is eventually calculated, I would insist that Williams andHill were the most gifted and accomplished scholars. For a defense of the mysterious textnamed the “Marxism of Marx,” see Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, andthe Poverty of American Marxism, 1907–1922 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1997).

4. This is not an exhaustive list: there can be no such thing. Even so, see Georg Lukács,History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press,1971)—note the citations of Weber on 95–96; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and theSpirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; New York: Scribner’s, 1958); Eduard



Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, trans. Edith C. Harvey (1899; New York: Schocken,1961); Karl Kautsky, The Materialist Conception of History, trans. Raymond Meyer andJohn H. Kautsky (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Rosa Luxemburg, TheAccumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (1951; New York: Monthly ReviewPress, 1968); Michal Kalecki, Studies in the Theory of Business Cycles, 1933–1939, trans.Ada Kalecki (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966); Joan Robinson, “Kalecki and Keynes,” inProblems of Economic Dynamics and Planning: Essays in Honor of Michal Kalecki (Warsaw:PWN-Polich Scintific Publishers, 1964), 335–41; Robinson, introduction to Accumulation ofCapital, by Luxemburg, 13–28; William English Walling, The Larger Aspects of Socialism(New York: Macmillan, 1913); Walling, “The Pragmatism of Marx and Engels,” New Review 1(1913): 434–39, 464–69; E. R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, rev. ed.(New York: Columbia University Press, 1907)—note the respectful citation of and dissentfrom Achille Loria on 135–36; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: InternationalPublishers, 1971); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1958)—note chap. 3; Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism andFeminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital and Class 8 (1979): 1–33; LiseVogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: TheReinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)—note chap. 7; Judith Butler, BodiesThat Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993)—note 31, 250 n. 5. My inclusion of Gompers inthis list of Marxists is determined by my reading of Stuart B. Kaufman, Samuel Gompersand 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 ofNew York Press, 1972), but also by many conversations over many years with MichaelMerrill and Dorothy Sue Cobble.

5. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1952), paragraphs 182–256, 122–55, and “Additions” on 266–78; KarlMarx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 83–111. But see alsoCarlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, trans. William McCuaig, ed. Nadia Urbinati (1930;Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), for an illuminating and forceful argumentagainst the position I have proposed here—an argument that explains how the “newutilitarians” (the doctrinaire Marxists of the Second and Third International) renouncedliberalism and why this move disarmed socialism by permitting statist command of civilsociety. 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 indenouncing, if not discrediting, both liberalism and individualism. In this latter (historical)sense, Rosselli’s argument is quite compelling, and deeply disturbing.

6. For an examination of the theory of value, and an application of the two-sector model, seeJames Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution,1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3–118, 295–337, esp.13–21 and 300–301 n. 23. The “transformation” problem that agitated so many socialistwriters in the early twentieth century—how do we get from the theory of value to averagerates of profit, they asked, or, more prosaically, how do we reconcile volumes 1 and 3 ofCapital?—was one symptom of a larger paradigm shift through which the labor theory ofvalue, like Newtonian physics, lost its explanatory adequacy circa 1900–20.



7. 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, 1906–9), 1:54–185; the “General Formula for Capital” is the titleand the topic of volume 1, part 2, chapter 4. For the periodization implied in volume 1, seeLivingston, Pragmatism and Political Economy, 21–40. On the significance of modernbanking and the credit system, see Marx, Capital, 3:434–719. It is worth noting here that theOxford English Dictionary’s first recorded reference to capitalism is from 1854 and that itoccurs in a novel (by Thackery), not in a treatise on political economy.

8. 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 rationalefor class analysis is attempted in James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System:Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1986), appendix B, 238–46. See otherwise G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind,trans. J. B. Baillie (1910; New York: Harper, 1967), 218–44; Karl Marx, “Economic andPhilosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol.3, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International, 1975), 229–346, esp. 333; AlexandreKojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit,trans. James H. Nichols, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 3–70.

9. See, for example, Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” inHistory and Class Consciousness, 83–222; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). On the “area of a culture,” see Williams, Cultureand Society (New York: Anchor, 1958), 340.

10. When I uttered these words about Turner’s borrowings from Marx via Loria at theconference where this essay was first presented, many people in the audience laughed; thisresponse makes me think that Lee Benson’s great book, Turner and Beard: AmericanHistorical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), has somehow beenforgotten.

11. My last question here is a paraphrase of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the PlantationHousehold: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1988), 80: “As members of the national culture in particular and of therepublic of letters in general, southerners drew upon the emerging bourgeois discourse toexplain their own world to themselves. But they drew upon it selectively, and above all theynever completely accepted the full implications of bourgeois individualism, much less thenotion of the separation of home and work.” This paraphrase is also a “professionalfailing”—a transformation accomplished by imitation—of the kind that Antonio Gramsciconjured when comparing medieval copyists to industrial workers under the regime ofFordism. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 308–10. The question ofpaternalism 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 661–65.

12. 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.

13. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 46–61. The debate on the “household economy”was started by Michael Merrill’s seminal essay “ ‘Cash Is Good to Eat’: Self-Sufficiency andExchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 3.4 (1976):



42–71, and complicated by James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1980): 678–700. Among the moreimportant contributions to the debate are Randolph Roth, The Democratic Dilemma:Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Christopher Clark, The Roots of RuralCapitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1990); and Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household. See also the brilliant use towhich W. Fitzhugh Brundage puts Fox-Genovese’s argument about the centrality ofhouseholds in southern society in Lynching in the New South (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1993), 58–71. And for the original version of our current claims about the marketrevolution, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944); butcompare 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,1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ellen Dubois, “The Radicalismof the Woman’s Suffrage Movement,” in Feminism and Equality, ed. Anne Phillips (NewYork: New York University Press, 1987), 127–38; and Linda Nicholson, Gender and History:The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press,1986). Fitzhugh Brundage’s Lynching in the New South and John W. Cell’s The HighestStage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the AmericanSouth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) are among the works that suggest howsignificant the household and the paterfamilias—thus gender as well as class—were to thenew ideology of white supremacy which informed the rule of Jim Crow after 1890. In TheSouthern Tradition, Genovese notes that antebellum conservatives North and South“focused on the individual freedom of the head of household”—that is, on the freedom ofthe “propertied father or husband” as against “freedom for individuals as persons,” or, whatis the same thing, individuals without familial roles and obligations. He also notes in passingthat this (bourgeois) principle of freedom continued to inform American conservatism longafter the Civil War, even into the 1980s, when M. E. Bradford emerged as a vigorousspokesman of the Southern Tradition (see 17–18, 69). Genovese had earlier shown that thedefense of slavery was necessarily a defense of male supremacy within the family. See TheWorld the Slaveholders Made, 195–202. See also Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow:Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chaps. 2–4; and Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy MyFreedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1997), chaps. 4–5.

15. See Marilyn Arthur, “ ‘Liberated Women’: The Classical Era,” in Becoming Visible: Womenin European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1977), 60–89, and Nicholson, Gender and History, 115–21. See also James Livingston,Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (NewYork: Routledge, 2001), 219–20 n. 31, on the uncanny resemblance between the misogynyof the ancient and the early modern periods of Western civilization. Like many otherhistorians, I used to think that the modern bourgeois specification of the relation betweennecessity and freedom represented a sharp break from the specifications offered by ancient,Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers. That is, I used to think that until the early modern



age, the performance of socially necessary labor was incompatible with freedom—beforethen, those who did the necessary work were slaves or serfs, not men who were free becausethey were removed from the material imperatives of goods production. I am not so sure ofthis axiom anymore, and therefore I have risked asking whether bourgeois society is atranshistorical phenomenon. The books that determined my doubts are Ellen Meiksins-Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1987), and Claude Mossé, TheAncient World at Work, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Norton, 1969), a volume in M. I.Finley’s series. Meiksins-Wood argues persuasively that Athenian democracy was based on“a small-holder economy,” not slavery. Mossé similarly argues that “the essential basis for theancient city was . . . a community of small farmers who were free and who owned their ownland. Although the historical evolution of the Greek cities and of Rome soon changed thisoriginal social structure, nevertheless the citizen-soldier who owned his land remained thesocial ideal for antiquity” (49). Or again: “An estate could of course be divided into variousunits, and would comprise farms from several different districts in Attica. But the fact is thatsmall estates of less than twenty-five acres were the general rule, and these small estateswere often farmed by the owner in person” (54, my emphasis). In effect, Mossé argues thatif our goal is to understand the social basis of republican political theory and practice, weshould 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. AsR. H. Tawney argued many years ago, they inhabited a bourgeois society in whichownership of property (or wealth) permitted ownership of one’s capacity to produce valuethrough work; but in their view property (or wealth) was the means to the end of a self-mastering personality—a way of validating free will—not an end in itself. Thus theaccumulation of property or the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself (the “general formulafor 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 werethoroughly bourgeois individuals who believed in private property and in markets untaintedby monopoly power or political corruption; they do, of course, debate the origins and effectsof the “Populist Revolt” of the 1890s, but, with significant exceptions such as TeresaBrennan, Lawrence Goodwyn, Michael Kazin, Elizabeth Sanders, and Roberto Unger, theydo 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 businessmode” as a source of resistance to the “world of large-scale production.” See otherwiseLouis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955), chaps. 6–7; andJames Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf,1982), part 2.

17. See Marx, Capital, 1:81–96; Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marxon Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (GardenCity, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 400–402; Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of theHumanitarian Sensibility,” in The Antislavery Debate, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1992), 107–60; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrialSociety (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Martin J. Sklar, The United States As aDeveloping Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. chaps. 1, 4, and 7.James is quoted from The American Scene (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), 159; Weber isquoted 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 thetransition from bourgeois society to capitalism—that is, on the improbability of the marketrevolution—see Livingston, Pragmatism and Political Economy, chaps. 1–2.



19. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 125–31.20. Ibid., 154–58, 171, 239–42. This same longing for an Archimedean point outside of the

social relations specific to capitalist civilization still animates the scholarship of manyinfluential historians. For example, see Lawrence Goodwyn on the “free social space”supposedly afforded by the “movement culture” of populism in Democratic Promise: ThePopulist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); and Jackson Learson the “clearing” one apparently needs to gain critical distance from and proper perspectiveon the object of one’s intellectual or artistic scrutiny, in Fables of Abundance: A CulturalHistory of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

21. On Henry Adams, the best work is forthcoming from Paul Bové, the editor of boundary 2;meanwhile, see John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994); and John Carlos Rowe, ed., New Essays on “The Education of HenryAdams” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. the brilliant piece by HowardHorwitz, “The Education and the Salvation of History,” 115–56.

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), andJackson Lears, Fables of Abundance. There are many others, of course, but these two arethe most visible and influential among professional historians. For further discussion of theirideas, see Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, chap. 1. On theperiodization of totalitarianism and the politics of “consensus” history, see Wilfred McClay,The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1994), chaps. 6–7. In the culture wars of the 1990s, which I read as astruggle waged largely on the left, two of the most incendiary public texts—one attackingthe cultural politics of Social Text, the other attacking the feminist theories of JudithButler—were written by active and committed leftists, Alan Sokal and Martha Nussbaum,both of whom favored a much more strenuously “materialist” position than they ascribed totheir ideological opponents.

23. On socialism as an actually existing dimension of American life, consult the seminal work ofMartin J. Sklar, including Developing Country, chaps. 1, 7. The latest installment in hisongoing effort to discredit Werner Sombart is “Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergenceof Modern America: The Formative Era,” in Reconstructing History, ed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: Routledge, 1999), 304–21. See alsoSidney Hook’s introduction to Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, vii–xx, esp. xvi:“Democratic socialists today are aware that socialism and capitalism as systems of economyare neither exhaustive of all possibilities nor exclusive of each other . . . [and] they denytherefore that the chief issue of our time is between socialism and capitalism.” See alsoBernstein’s remarks on socialism as the heir to liberalism in ibid., 148–53.

24. Genovese, Southern Tradition, 97 (my emphasis); hereafter cited as ST. Weber’s ambiguitieswith 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), 196–244, esp.238–40.

25. ST, 100, 95 (my emphasis). See also note 27 below.26. On the political/intellectual crisis of the 1780s—the “critical period”—see Gordon Wood,

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), chaps. 7–11.See also Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic (New York: Norton, 1980), 90–132.

27. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in The Mind of theFounder, ed. Marvin Meyers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 88. On the problem ofmajority rule, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 165–68; and



J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the AtlanticRepublican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 63–78. Harry Jaffatreats this problem as the contradiction between the imperatives of equality and consentembodied in the Declaration of Independence. See his Crisis of the House Divided: AnInterpretation 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 atheoretical idiom that strongly resembles Genovese’s—and thus reduces the meaning ofdemocracy to majority rule—is Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: IlliberalDemocracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003).

28. Madison, “Vices,” 89–91.29. See Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 108–14, where Madison’s design is

discussed in more detail.30. ST, 28. Lincoln’s 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), 3:522–50. See also the speech of June 26, 1857, on the Dred Scott decision,2:398–410.

31. ST, 34 (my emphasis). On the American left’s populist proclivities, see Livingston,Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, chaps. 1–2, 4, and 6.

32. That the antimonopoly tradition tends toward statism is demonstrated in Martin J. Sklar,The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law,and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 127–45.



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Marxism and the Politics in History Reflexions on Genovese