BOOKS
485
and, in addition, American society has shown a remarkable resilience and
ability to bounce back from severe crises. Nor does populism, which ap–
pears to be one of Lasch's prescriptions for our ills, seem to be adequate,
for it has been, after all, a fundamental current of the country's life from
the beginning. And Lasch's assertion that he remains a man of the left is
not reassuring, since the left, at least in recent years, has provided the
ideology about which he complains.
EDITH KURZWEIL
North and South
THE SOUTHERN TRADITION: THE ACHIEVEMENT AND LIM–
ITATIONS OF AN AMERICAN CONSERVATISM. By
Eugene
D.
Genovese. Harvard University Press. $22.50.
At once a bold tract for the time and a cogent summary interpretation
of the complex relationship of the history of the American South to the
history of the nation, Eugene Genovese's new book,
The Southern Tra–
dition: The Achievement and Limitations oj an American Conservatism,
ex–
presses the hope that through attention to the "best" principles of the
"republicanism" espoused by "southern conservatives," Americans may
find a way to arrest the "current national drift into our ever deepening
moral and political paralysis" and restore political, economic, and cul–
tural order in our society. Genovese's expression of this hope is at times
impassioned; it is as though he sees us in an apocalyptic either-or situa–
tion: either our salvation must come from a favorable response to
Southern conservatism, or not at all. Indeed a superficial glance at
The
Southern Tradition
(a brief book consisting of the 1993 Massey Lectures in
American Civilization at Harvard University) might lead one to think
that our leading Marxist historian - a native New Yorker, brought up
in a working-class Brooklyn family, who now considers Georgia to be
his adopted home - went up to the alma mater of Emerson, Thoreau,
and Lowell to tell the Yankee intellectuals that, close upon a century–
and- a-half since their forebears achieved a smashing military victory in the
