The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview [Paperback]

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Author), Eugene D. Genovese (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2005

Presenting many slaveholders as intelligent, honorable and pious men and women, this study asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that inflicted gross abuse on slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ("free-labor") society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In exploring their terrible and complex subject with honesty and sympathy, the authors have grappled heroically with the ambiguity at the heart of history and in the heart of man."
-The Atlantic Monthly

"Extraordinarily erudite. What is most impressive is the authors' ability to tell us precisely what was meant by the innumerable literary and cultural references found in the writings of the slaveholding intellectuals. They seem to have read all the books that their subjects read and talked about and are thus able to get inside their minds to a remarkable degree."
-New York Review of Books

"This book is one that libraries of colleges offering courses in American history ought to acquire."
-Catholic Library World

"Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, focusing as they should on religion and political thought, have turned their immense learning and acuity to presenting the strongest case possible about the slaveholders intellectual and moral virtues, as well as their enormous failings and tragedies. Historians, including those who do not share the Genoveses's Old South sympathies, will find The Mind of the Master Class a commanding and illuminating book."
-Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

"The strength of the book lies in the Genoveses' depth of research and command of the primary sources. The Mind of the Master Class is an important contribution to southern intellectual history and undoubtedly will be read and debated for years to come."
-Adam L. Tate, Clayton State University, Journal of Social History

"...the Genoveses offer us one more insight into the Southern mind." -Hal Goldman, Historie sociale

Book Description

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. A great many of the slaveholding men and women were intelligent, honorable, and pious; yet, these very people, admirable in so many ways, presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. Even now, there is much to be learned from their moral and political reflections on their times--and ours.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 824 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (October 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521615623
• ISBN-13: 978-0521615624
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #252,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exhaustively researched, lucidly written and well reasoned, January 25, 2008

By 

David Liebers (Rochester, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Paperback)

Eugene Genovese, author of Bancroft Prize winning Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, has made another brilliant contribution to scholarship on American slavery. Genovese and his wife and co-author Elizabeth Fox-Genovese move beyond traditional assumptions about the slave-master relationship, humanize the hegemonic Master class, and provide fair analysis of the theology, corporate ethos and mentalité of the Southern elite.

Unfettered by moral imposition, and fears about assuaging those engaged in the structure versus agency debate, this work provides a human insight into an ugly, exploitative system that has in many ways defined and haunted American society. The notion of a southern mythology, wrapped in an extension of Christendom and medieval chivalric tendencies, is persuasively woven into the economic, religious, cultural and political complexities of the American South. Genovese and Fox-Genovese draw fine distinctions, and tease apart the most volatile of issues sustaining a clear and comprehensive discussion.

35 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An intellectual history of the psychology of American slaveholders and slavery supporters in the antebellum South, December 5, 2005

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Paperback)

Humanities professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and retired history professor Eugene D. Genovese combine their talents in The Mind Of The Master Class, an intellectual history of the psychology of American slaveholders and slavery supporters in the antebellum South. The Mind Of The Master Class is so thoroughly researched, and draws so heavily upon primary sources, that every single page of the main text sports meticulous citations in footnote format. Though The Mind Of The Master Class is a scholarly text, scrutinizing in-depth exactly what made the slaveholding South tick. Why and how was American slavery once so thoroughly justified, defended, and fought for, in spite of its reprehensible violation of human rights - a violation as apparent to abolitionists and others 150 years ago as it is to all of America today? The reasoning and examples given in The Mind Of The Master Class flow very naturally, and will easily draw lay readers into the labyrinthine intrigue of the deceptions the human mind plays on itself. Highly recommended.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This monograph requires patience and dedication; it is also one of the triumphsof American historical scholarship, October 3, 2008

By 

mark twain "nunya" (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Paperback)

Ms. McKinney would do herself much good if she would either content herself with failing to commit the intellectual energy required by this book or to at least be content to wait until she has grasped the work before thoughtlessly dismissing a text she feels has defeated her. The authors did not intend this work to be an easy read; the weight of the book should dismiss any illusions a non-committed reader may have about bringing this along to the beach for a little "light" reading. But it is in demanding this subtlety of thought that the authors accomplished their initial aim: to allow the reader to actually grasp the nuance and complexity that were woven together into a fabric that was nevertheless "solid"--or, as Genovese has tried to explain for almost 50 years, the master class ruled southern society by means of cultural hegemony. Ms. McKinney, no doubt unaware of the 50 years of scholarship that culminated in this work, casts it off as "research" notes that the authors were simply too lazy to shape into a narrative arc. This is, of course, foolish, erroneous, and given the unquestionable brilliance of Dr. Genovese and the late-Dr. Fox-Genovese, a little more than arrogant of Ms. McKinney. The chapter titles she dismisses as lyrical epigrams to incoherent collections of quotations, are, on the contrary, nuanced history practiced at the most erudite level. These chapters are masterful: "The Holy Spirit in the Word of God" details how orthodox southern evangelicals began to grow culturally alienated from their northern brethren as northern theology drifted in a liberal direction that allowed believers to follow the impulses of "the Spirit" within them without cross-checking those impulses with what Scripture taught; white southern evangelicals, on the other hand, held fast in their orthodoxy, insisting that the "true" Holy Spirit would never lead the believer to any action contrary to the Word. As for McKinney's qualms about the chapter "Between Individualism and Corporatism," I would have to ask her--with no intentions of malice--if she was clear as to what body of scholarship this chapter addressed before she read the chapter, because if she had been, the basic points may not have been so obscure to her: southern slaveholders ruled over a means of labor-relations that were vestiges of centuries of "premodern" history, yet their own society--and the institution of slavery as well--was thoroughly embedded in a modern, capitalist, liberal transatlantic economy; as a result of this "hybrid" labor and economic regime, white southerners had to attempt to strike a delicate balance between their commitment to "organic," hierarchical, and corporate structuring and obligations, and their vision of having their own role to play in the march of progress set off by the American Revolution--a vision of progress predicated upon the possessive individualism which struck at the very heart of their own labor system. But the Genoveses do not leave the readers here in imbiguity, as Ms. McKinney seems to want to believe; rather, they show that southerners attempted to reconcile their (seemingly)paradoxical commitments to corporate social relations and political individualism by arguing for progress of a different temperament than that envisioned in the bourgeois cultures of the Northeast and Western Europe: for southerners, progress could only advance safely and surely by advancing slowly: the disastrous results of the radical upheaval of traditional ways so evident in the aftermath of the French REvolution had been only one of history's more recent and definitive examples of this principle in the southerners' perspectives. Thus, hopefully Ms. McKinney can see the meaning of the subtitle of this masterwork: the hegemonic worldview shared by slaveholders was shaped by their common conclusions concerning what history and Christianity taught about the notions of progress, economic development, and bourgeois social values spreading everywhere that industrialism made itself king: true, southerners often bickered over the finer points of, say Arminianism and Calvinism, or how to best characterize the French Revolution, being that despite its myriad evils, it was nonetheless the product of a corrupt, decadent, decaying, and socially vacant Old Regime that ought to have been supplanted by a moderate republican culture that could patiently widen the sphere of liberty and progress by cautiously and slowly expanding the numbers of citizens granted the rights, duties, and responsibility of "freedom"; but despite the myriad, nuanced perspectives various southerners laid upon the scales of their orthodox faith and their reading of history, they always found that the scales leveled-off, and they shared a broad consensus that allowed them to identify with one another, and increasingly led them to find their countrymen to the North much more foreign and alien than they had foreseen. The Genoveses did not--as one scholar unfortunately was not able to understand--abandon a healthy perspective on the role that southern economic and social relations--that is, slavery in a slave society--shaped and was in turn shaped by their intellectual worldview. Thus, despite a good deal of heat and little light written about the Genoveses' "defection" to the Right and away from all they had accomplished, this remarkable monograph adds greater evidence to the typically Gramscian interpretation of history favored by Genovese: Gramsci's great achievement was to correct the unbalanced clumsiness of earlier "vulgar" materialist readings of "marxian" history by mashing it together with Croce's idealism. Genovese has ALWAYS been clear on this point: his early commitment to Marxism was predicated on a Gramscian understanding that dialectical materialism SHOULD take culture and the intellectual life of peoples quite seriously, as the material and the intellectual realities (or, structure and superstructure) of societies shape one another in a constant tug-of-war--that, of course, was what made such an improved reading of Marx trully DIALECTICAL, at least relative to the vulgar materialism of skeptics looking for an ideological home, or the craven idealism of the still-born, impotent New Left, many of whom still grasped pathetically for some sort of recognition as members of a Marxist, radical tradition rather than facing the anomie embedded in their own relativistic, intellectually-sloppy, and generally disgustingly self-interested, self-righteous, and self-glorifying claims to speak out against the oppressors of labor. The New Left not only went into this fight without any values, but also without any weapons--after, excluding those few who left the academy in order to remain consistent with their ideological claims, the majority was never interested in a fight to begin with--most of them had taken enough beatings in highschool, and all they really wanted from their new radicalism were tenured positions from which they could take their petty revenge upon the children whose cheerleader mothers and jock fathers had made them feel so insecure to begin with. Quickly, the New Left back-peddled, as tenure allowed these workers' radicals to join country clubs and drive luxury vehicles: "there's no reason for us to actually have to fight," they suggested; "afterall, you merely believe in your ideological principles, and we believe that there's no such thing as truth, so we don't mind if the Old Left peddles the OLD CAUSE, for we don't think they're anymore "untrue" in their ideals than we are in our own--as everyone is. But nihilism is rather unpleasant to face-up to in oneself, and plus, it's gotten a bad rap amongst the conservative alumni who endow our tenured seats and save us places at the club for Sunday brunch, so you all just keep at your little class consciousness spiel; as for us, we've invented a new Radicalism--the radical defense of me, me, me-ism, which we are going to dub 'identity politics'; it really works out much better for us than that old class nonsense anyhow, especially since none of us has ever labored outside they doors of private educational institutions. But this 'me-ism'--I mean 'identity politics' really has a lot to offer me NOW, while all that socialist talk demanded patience and spoke of the future." Genovese did not buy into the "me-ism" politics of the New Left or the nihilism which naturally emerged in its hypocritical wake. He may vote different; he might go to Mass. But excluding largely semantic alterations and reasonable concessions toward those who demonstrate the South's rather "modern" economic efficiency, he has spent the last 50 years continually strengthening his position that the southern slaveholders represented a novel class in human society; created a novel culture quite unlike those of Europe, the Northeast, and the slave economies of Latin America; and were the only slaveholding ruling class in the modern world to forge a cultural dominance over a region in which they were an overwhelming minority--a cultural dominance that would allow them to not only break away from the Union in order to construct a separate state to govern the national separation that had long been a practical fact, but they did so with the majority of non-slaveholding southern whites following behind them in defiance of those northerners whom they believed were beating a trail hard and fast toward a society in which anomie, family-disfunction, and despair would only be thinly vailed by the smokescreen of material abundance an narcotic abandon.