Conservatives Against Capitalism

From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization

Peter Kolozi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544610
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Few beliefs seem more fundamental to American conservatism than faith in the free market. Yet throughout American history, many of the major conservative intellectual and political figures have harbored deep misgivings about the unfettered market and its disruption of traditional values, hierarchies, and communities. In Conservatives Against Capitalism, Peter Kolozi traces the history of conservative skepticism about the influence of capitalism on politics, culture, and society.

Kolozi discusses conservative critiques of capitalism—from its threat to the Southern way of life to its emasculating effects on American society to the dangers of free trade—considering the positions of a wide-ranging set of individuals, including John Calhoun, Theodore Roosevelt, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Patrick J. Buchanan. He examines the ways in which conservative thought went from outright opposition to capitalism to more muted critiques, ultimately reconciling itself to the workings and ethos of the market. By analyzing the unaddressed historical and present-day tensions between capitalism and conservative values, Kolozi shows that figures regarded as iconoclasts belong to a coherent tradition, and he creates a vital new understanding of the American conservative pantheon.

1

EMERGING CAPITALISM AND ITS CONSERVATIVE CRITICS

The Pro-Slavery Critique of Capitalism in Antebellum America

Capital is a cruel master.

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters

Defenders of slavery such as John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), James Henry Hammond (1807–1864), and George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) understood that a conservative society, culture, and politics require a stable economic base. They believed that at its core, capitalism, particularly its laissez-faire variant, is unstable, that periodically the capitalist market undergoes what economists call “corrections.” These necessary corrections are inherent in a capitalist economy and result in a whole host of social, political, economic, and cultural consequences. Therefore, as Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and a long line of American conservatives concluded, capitalism is by its nature revolutionary and unstable. With this key insight in mind, the defenders of slavery, the warrior-aristocrats, and the Southern Agrarians were among the most penetrating critics of laissez-faire capitalism in the American conservative tradition. They imagined alternatives to laissez-faire that rejected socialism, promised greater economic stability, and preserved inequality and its accompanying forms of domination and control.

Pro-slavery thought indicates that challenging the hegemony of capitalist thinking in the United States has a long history among thinkers on the political right. Indeed, for decades in the antebellum period, capitalism was questioned not only in the realm of ideas but also in the South’s social and economic relations. As Eugene Genovese wrote, the “slaveholders presented the only politically powerful challenge to liberal capitalism to emanate from within the United States.”1 In the realm of ideas, pro-slavery thinkers provided the right’s most direct critique of capitalism in American thought.2 Their strand of traditional conservatism elevated inequality and hierarchy as historically rooted, necessary, and desirable. Pro-slavery thinkers also confronted the central tension in conservatism between the revolutionary nature of capitalism and the stable rootedness of a traditional social, cultural, political, and economic order. Later conservatives attempted to do the same, but unlike them, the defenders of slavery could point to an existing alternative in slavery. Pro-slavery thinkers then tried to resolve this tension by rejecting capitalism outright, as did Fitzhugh, or by circumscribing the expansion of capitalism, as Calhoun and Hammond attempted to do. Either way, for them Southern slave society was decidedly not capitalist. For defenders of slavery, the slave system, and not capitalism, was the economic foundation consistent with a conservative social order on which the progress of civilization depended.

To contemporary readers, it might seem rather shocking to find that Southern intellectuals not only defended slavery as a social good but also believed that it was a social system superior to that of capitalism. Furthermore, such a belief was not a marginal one held by a few cranks but by respected thinkers and statesmen of the antebellum South, the most famous of whom that I will discuss is John C. Calhoun.3 Calhoun was twice elected vice president of the United States, secretary of war under President James Monroe, and secretary of state under President John Tyler, and in addition, he was an impressive orator and senator from South Carolina. He was also an influential political theorist who championed nullification (the right of states to nullify a federal law that they believed to be unconstitutional) and developed the concept of a concurrent majority as a mechanism to protect the rights of a minority from the legislation of a numerical majority. His Disquisition on Government is the most famous and systematic example of his thought on the nature and theory of government.4

Lesser known than Calhoun, James Henry Hammond was also an influential pro-slavery thinker and critic of capitalism. He was a planter and elected official from South Carolina, for which he served as the state’s representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, one term as governor of the state, and as its U.S. senator until the state succeeded from the Union in 1860. Both Calhoun and Hammond were slave owners.

Perhaps the most iconoclastic of the defenders of slavery and the most ardent conservative critic of capitalism was George Fitzhugh. Like Calhoun and Hammond, Fitzhugh was a slave owner. Unlike the two other men, however, he did not serve in elected office but did serve in various government positions, including some for the Confederacy during the Civil War and for the Freedman’s Bureau after the war. Fitzhugh was a tireless writer on behalf of the antebellum South, the institution of slavery, and the conservatism embodied by the two. He published several books, including Sociology for the South and Cannibals All!, in which he defended slavery not on racial grounds, although he thought that blacks were racially inferior to whites, but on abstract grounds as a superior form of social organization. In addition to his books, Fitzhugh frequently published in De Bow’s Review, the most important pro-slavery journal of the period, as well as in other publications.

Central to pro-slavery thinkers’ critique of capitalism and their defense of slavery was their indictment of the wage system as a key source of social disorder, radicalism, and revolutionary upheaval. At its core, the pro-slavery critique of capitalism is that the domination and control of the stronger class, the one with the right and obligation to rule over the weaker classes, was not sufficiently complete under a free-labor system. The result was that the “front ranks”—to use Calhoun’s terminology—did not exert enough control over the laboring masses and that in turn, the working class lost any sense of allegiance to their social superiors and established institutions.

In contrast to the disintegrative effects of the Northern free-labor system, pro-slavery thinkers argued, the paternalistic order of the Old South was better equipped to attenuate the antagonism between the owners of the means of production and the laboring masses. In contrast to the wage system, their model of socioeconomic relations constituted a paternalism characterized by the lifelong reciprocal duties and responsibilities associated with those of an extended family.5 The defenders of slavery believed that the master-slave relationship embodied these social ties beyond the kin relationship and made the relationship between unequals more rational, humane, mutually beneficial, socially desirable, and necessary.

The Southern slaveholder critique of capitalism had its roots in, and was closely bound to, the defense of slavery from attacks by abolitionist intellectuals, journalists, members of the clergy, and sympathetic elected officials in the United States and Europe.6 Pro-slavery thinkers used explicitly racist arguments to justify their racial and class domination. Blacks were not thought to be rational, and unless they were coerced into labor by slave masters, they would resort to laziness or criminal behavior. This paternalistic view placed an obligation on the slaveholders of the South to protect blacks from their inevitable destitution in a free, competitive society for which they were, by nature, ill equipped.7 The defenders of slavery used critiques of the free-labor system against abolitionists who attacked Southern slavery, but they ignored the brutalization, misery, and suffering of the wage laborers in the industrial cities in the North and in England. Needless to say, the slaveholder critique of capitalism and their concomitant defense of the South’s “peculiar institution” were arguments of a self-interested ruling class intent on preserving their racial and class privilege. Their analysis of the social consequences of capitalism is insightful, however, because they saw themselves and the Old South as a distinct social order. For them, capitalism fostered class warfare and a spirit of selfish individualism, and it made radical ideas widely appealing, all of which were ingredients for a revolutionary upheaval and a return to barbarism. In the words of Fitzhugh, a “free society,” of which the wage-labor system was a central component, “everywhere begets Isms, and … Isms soon beget bloody revolutions.”8 In protecting Southern slavery and seeking its expansion to territories and would-be states on the continent, the Caribbean, and Central America, defenders of slavery saw their system as a bulwark of republican freedom and Western civilization defending against the radicalism of both the abolitionists and the working classes that were unleashed by capitalism.9

THE EXPANSION OF SLAVERY AND THE EMERGENCE OF CAPITALISM IN THE UNITED STATES

The intellectual and political debate over the issue of slavery and abolition has had a long history in America, stretching back to the colonial era, and slavery has been defended on numerous, sometimes contradictory, grounds. These have included the practical necessity of slavery as essential to the economic development of the South and the United States; slavery as a means of averting race war; ethical and theological justifications for slavery cited in scripture and arguing that it served God’s purpose by “civilizing” and “Christianizing” Africans; pseudoscientific evidence contending that blacks are physiologically and intellectually inferior to whites;10 and slavery justified in the abstract as the proper station for the “inferior,” irrespective of race. Beginning in the 1830s, these justifications for slavery were joined with arguments stressing its positive aspects, that it was comparatively more beneficial for slaveholders, slaves, society, and republican institutions than was the system of free labor. According to Peter Kolchin, in the late antebellum period the defense of slavery became “less hesitant, tentative, and apologetic … more insistent on the positive virtues of slavery and the society it fostered.”11 Drew Gilpin Faust, one of the foremost scholars of antebellum pro-slavery thought, suggests that the defense of slavery in the 1830s changed in both “style and tone” and “substance.”12 She contends that pro-slavery thought became more “self-conscious and systematic” as a reaction to the strengthening of antislave sentiment following the Missouri debates in 1818 to 1820 and the flood of abolitionist propaganda in the 1830s.13 Indeed, a key abolitionist argument against slavery following the Missouri Compromise was that as slavery expanded to the western territories, it would shut out free labor from these lands.

But the substantive change in the proslavery narrative had to do with more than defenses against the abolitionists’ rhetorical attacks. After 1830, slave-based cotton production became more and more important to the Southern economy because of the demand from merchants and textile manufacturers in Northern cities and, more important, from manufacturers in England. Slaveholders no longer viewed slavery as a “white man’s burden” but as a positive good for all.14 According to historian Eric Foner, “On the eve of the Civil War, it [cotton] represented well over half the total value of American exports. In 1860, the economic investment represented by the slave population exceeded the value of the nation’s factories, railroads, and banks combined.”15 Slaveholders saw the South as distinct from the rest of the capitalist world, but they recognized at the same time that it was closely intertwined with the international capitalist market. Indeed, the price of cotton, tobacco, and other agricultural products central to the Southern economy were subject to price fluctuations on the international market. British textile manufacturers were heavily dependent on Southern cotton, and Britain was its largest consumer and the U.S. South was its largest supplier. The growing demand for Southern cotton therefore made the institution and expansion of slavery a lucrative venture.

As Sven Beckert pointed out, increases in the price of cotton resulted in the territorial expansion of the crop. Cotton planters’ “migration to Alabama and Louisiana, and eventually to Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas,” he wrote, “was choreographed to the movement of cotton prices.”16 Rather than gradually dying out, as early-nineteenth-century abolitionists believed that it would, the institution of slavery expanded as new states were admitted into the Union. The annexation of huge tracts of territory as a result of the Mexican War, the popular-sovereignty provisions of the Compromise of 1850, and the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act guaranteed the further expansion of slavery nearly to the Pacific coast. The appetite for uncultivated land and thus the expansion of slavery was so great, in fact, that before the Civil War, slaveholders, Southern politicians, and various adventurers envisioned a Southern empire annexing the Caribbean and Central America.17 “I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it,” stated Mississippi Senator Albert G. Brown. He continued:

If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it up for a fair equivalent, well—if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery. And a footing in Central America will powerfully aid us in acquiring those other states. Yes, I want these countries for the spread of slavery. I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Conservatives Against Capitalism
• 1. Emerging Capitalism and Its Conservative Critics: The Pro-Slavery Critique of Capitalism in Antebellum America
• 2. In Search of the Warrior-Statesman: The Critique of Laissez-Faire Capitalism by Brooks Adams and Theodore Roosevelt
• 3. The Agrarian Critique of Capitalism
• 4. The New Conservatives: The Cold War and the Making of Conservative Orthodoxy
• 5. The Neoconservative Critiques of and Reconciliation with Capitalism
• 6. The Paleoconservative Critique of Global Capitalism
• Conclusion: Conservatism at a Crossroads
• Notes
• Index