Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
Chargement... The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretationpar Eugene D. Genovese
Aucun Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
A seminal and original work that delves deeply into what slaveholders thought. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)306.362Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Economic institutions Systems of labor, industrial sociology SlaveryClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
Est-ce vous ?Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing. |
Genovese devotes much of the rest of this work to a consideration of the Southern planter ideology through an examination of George Fitzhugh's defense of the institution of slavery. Fitzhugh went back to pre-Lockean notions of social relations in which paternal bonds were unserverable. In this sense Fitzhugh invalidates the very premise upon which the American Revolution was fought. He is the ultimate feudal reactionary, thrusting the doctrines of Filmer in the face of Lockean bourgeois revolutionaries. Yet Fitzhugh went even further than the repudiation of the American revolution. He repudiated the English Revolution of the 17th century; he repudiated capitalism in favor of a pre-bourgeois romanticism:
In effect, he could only argue that exploitation and class stratification were inevitable and that slavery, with its principle of responsibility of one man for another, led to less hardship and despair than capitalism, with its principle of every man for himself, for at least the worker had a community to appeal to other than one based on the cash nexus. (p. 160)
If the slave mode of production had not been so profitable in the South, as the factory mode was in the North, there would never have been a Fitzhugh. Yet slavery was profitable and Fitzhugh consequently based his ideological exposition on a thriving institution. Fitzhugh knew, as did his contemporaries in the 1840s and 50s, that the very existence of the slave system was predicated upon the expansion of that institution into the territories. Here the national system broke down.