The Sixth Element

Jim Livingston argues that bourgeois individualism is compatible with a host of different social formations—that it is not simply a feature of capitalism at a particular stage of its development. His scholarly purpose is to show, contra Eugene Genovese (and, alas, Oakes), that the slaveholders of the Old South could be both bourgeois and paternalistic at the same time. His political purpose is to show, once again contra Genovese, that bourgeois democracy—as opposed to mere populism—is compatible with socialism. I leave the political question to others; the politics of the professoriate hold no interest to me. Instead, I focus here only on the historical and theoretical issues Livingston raises in his smart, feisty essay.

Livingston adduces five elements that characterize Marxist history, as opposed to Marxist theory. By these five criteria, I could easily rank myself among his comrades. But I part company on a sixth element of Marxist historiography, unnoticed by Livingston, that has shaped the way southern slavery has been approached for over a generation, including the way Livingston asks his questions. The sixth element is teleology, or rather a very specific and powerful teleology that sees human history moving progressively from barbarism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism, and hopefully, on to socialism. This teleology, and the mechanism of historical change that propels it, gives Marxism its theoretical potency. It is why Marxist historiography cut its teeth on a series of brilliant analytical debates over the "transitions" from ancient slavery to medieval feudalism and from medieval feudalism to capitalism. It is why Barbara Fields is correct to point out that "race" and "class" do not make for comparable analytical categories: class comes to us with a powerful theory of historical change; race has no such analytical weight.

I do not mean to say that Marxism is uniquely teleological. Classical republicanism, especially as elaborated by Polybius, offered a circular theory of historical change. But whereas the classical categories of transformation were political, Enlightenment liberals shifted to social categories and posited a theory in which history progressed from savagery to civilization and perhaps to decadence. The influence of this liberal version of historical progress was widespread in postrevolutionary America, and it was depicted most forcefully in a dramatic series of paintings by Thomas Cole. Hegel inherited this liberal tradition, but he proposed a modified series of social stages in which the savage state of perpetual turmoil gives way to civilization when the first prisoner of war is offered enslavement rather than death. Thus does human civilization begin with slavery and progress from there. Eventually, Marx adopted this teleology, as did Marxist historians—and Jim Livingston.

By placing slavery at an early stage of historical development, Marxist teleology defines the reemergence of slavery in the modern world as an anomaly, an "archaic" social formation. This premise suffuses slavery studies, and by extension Livingston's article. Without it, he has no question to ask, no problem to confront, for the compatibility of bourgeois individualism with paternalism only poses a problem to those who presuppose that slavery is precapitalist, premodern, pre-whatever.

The teleology-driven definition of slavery stands in stark contrast to Livingston's view of bourgeois individualism. Indeed, the great burden of his essay is to interrogate the character of bourgeois individualism so as to demonstrate its historical ubiquity. Not only does Livingston divorce the bourgeoisie from its traditional place in the history of capitalist development; he even suggests that bourgeois individualism may constitute a "transhistorical" phenomenon. This serves his analytical purposes in much the same way that "merchant capital" serves Genovese's: it allows them to explain, or explain away, the apparently "capitalist" elements of southern society, without discarding the teleological premise of slavery's "archaic" nature. Hence the paradox at the heart of Livingston's opening question: could the slaveholders be bourgeois individualists and paternalists at the same time? Absent the teleological premise that slavery constitutes an archaic social formation, this question has no meaning.

But what if you start from a different premise? What if you...