Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

3-9-2008

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Law School Research Papers - Public Law & Legal Theory; Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence & Legal Philosophy eJournals

Abstract

Michael OBriens twovolume Conjectures of Order Intellectual Life in the American South 18101860 Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2004 is as voluminous is it is revolutionary OBrien places antebellum southern thought so often treated as the production of a cultural backwater firmly in a transatlantic tradition He identifies the regions historical political philosophical scientific and theological writings as sophisticated products of a postcolonial order and as examples of the gradations of European thought from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Age OBriens analysis of the impact of slavery on intellectual life is synthetic not original He shows that southerners had come to terms with the Peculiar Institution but likewise that many of them understood its precarious place in the western tradition and were filled with anxiety over its likely impermanence O Brave Old World discusses OBriens scholarly technique interestingly similar to that of eighteenth and nineteeenthcentury historians and describes how he builds an interwoven story and establishes a canon of works The essay praises OBrien as a major contributor to the rebirth of narrative history but criticizes him for concentrating too much on the intellectuals of the eastern seaboard Likewise it criticizes him for not paying enough attention to the legal profession as an intellectual enterprise in particular for slighting the lawyers who as creative writers created the genre known as Southwestern Humor This essay a revised version of a untitled piece published in Volume XIII of Southern Studies contains an addemdum briefly discussing Elizabeth FoxGenovese and Eugene Genoveses The Mind of the Master Class 2005

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