One of the topics I’ve long been interested in is the traffic between the European right and the slaveholding South in the US. We know a fair amount, now, about the relationship between the abolitionist movement in the US and the European left, including Marx, but less about the impact that slavery and its defense had on the European right. What first piqued my interest in this issue was reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche talks a lot about slavery in his work, and it’s long been the conventional wisdom that his references here are metaphorical and philosophical rather than contemporary and literal. I’ve had my doubts about that, as I’ve written. One can hear in the opening passages of “The Greek State” […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right, The State
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Tags abolition, Civil War, cultural Cold War, Don Doyle, Frederick Douglass, Gobineau, Josiah Nott, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Mary Dudziak, slavery
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press. Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy. Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote: […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Alexander Stephens, David Post, David Roediger, Edmund Morgan, Hannah Arendt, Henry Wiencek, James Henry Hammond, John C. Calhoun, Josiah Nott, Louis Hartz, Lynn Hunt, Paul Finkelman, Robert Brassilach, Thomas Cobb, Thomas Dew, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. DuBois, William Harper
In honor of Rick Perry’s decision to quit the race, I’m reprinting one part of this blog post from September, which discusses what I still think is the most memorable moment of the entire campaign: when, in one of the early debates, Perry invoked Galileo in defense of his position on climate change. The most arresting moment of the debate was when Rick Perry invoked Galileo in defense of his skepticism about climate change. Here’s what he said: The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense. Just because you have a group of scientists who stood […]