Publications:
Publications:
"The Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan as Earl Fascism," Studies in American Political Development (forthcoming)
How did white Southerners defend slavery? My book project The Science of Slavery examines a group of intellectuals I call the proslavery technocrats who appealed to the nascent social sciences—such as political economy, statistics, racial science, sociology and even socialism—to defend bondage between the 1820s and 1860s. I show how this faction of proslavery Southerners shifted to social scientific analysis after the 1820s, and institutionalized slavery in correspondingly sophisticated forms. Proslavery technocracy also demonstrates that American defenses of slavery were therefore not rooted in republican, feudal, or patriarchal (e.g. familial) arguments—as scholars have long contended—nor was the Antebellum South an intellectual backwater. Proslavery authors instead enlisted disciplines at the frontiers of science and they were amongst the first adopters of social science in the United States.
More broadly, The Science of Slavery also helps us understand the distinctive proslavery vision for capitalism, one based on a critique of “wage-slavery” in free labor societies. Fearing the social pathologies they attributed to free labor in the American North and Europe, proslavery technocracy theorized a vision for capitalism beyond the liberal variant: "a coordinated economy" based on state power and the plantation. Today, we are accustomed to the liberal visions for capitalism of the post-WWII era—broadly defined by what scholars call neoliberalism—and the proslavery technocrats underscore the importance of non-liberal visions for capitalism in history. This history is worth returning to in the present, as intellectuals depart from capitalism in its liberal form.