The Mind of the Master Class

The scholarship of Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's intellectual history The Mind of the Master Class makes it an invaluable resource for specialists. The authors have read widely and well in the documents of elite antebellum southern thinkers and have assembled those scholars' musings on such topics as the French Revolution, antiquity, and the Middle Ages. Those reflections delight and occasionally startle the reader. The authors, however, focus on southern intellectuals' views on the relationships of philosophy and religion, religion and science, slavery and the Bible, and, most welcome, history and progress. The work is a surprisingly traditional intellectual history, in which great minds communicate across time on shared issues. Neither the writing of this brand of intellectual history nor use of “the South” as a monolithic subject for a history has been popular with scholars for a generation. Work that breaks from or ignores the professional pack, as Genovese and Fox-Genovese's does here, is always refreshing and often leads to provocative new debates. But in this magisterial and occasionally strident book, the results are uneven

Elite · Epistemology · Faith · Intellectual history · Library science · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy