Abstract

This is a 3,000 word review of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese's monumental study of the intellectual life of the ante-bellum South entitled "The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview "(Cambridge University Press, 2005) While acknowledging the book as an outstanding achievement in terms of the sheer comprehensiveness of its scope and the breadth of its coverage of southern intellectual culture it concludes that the authors' pre-existing methodological assumptions imposed severe limitations on how deeply they could penetrate into the philosophical spirit animating "The Mind of the South" prior to the onset of the Civil War.