This week and next we will survey two of America's very worst human products. Two of the people whose personalities and ideas are so offensive that historians have scarcely known what to do with them. Next week it's Hinton Helper, but for today we go to George Fitzhugh, who so loves slavery and the planter regime, he was so entranced by its callbacks to the Romantic Middle Ages, and he was so convinced that slavery was both natural and just that he even advocated that poor white people be enslaved. Some historians have gone so far as to say that George Fitzhugh stands virtually alone in American history as the one major figure who seriously departed from Lockean political philosophy and even modernity itself. To examine this bizarre and frankly disturbing thinker, I've invited historian Phil Magnus back on the show. You may remember him from a while back when we spoke about his recent book, What is Classical Liberal History? But for now, we have to turn to the very opposite of Classical Liberalism, so we can see just how bad it gets. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. All right, so Phil, can you start us out with just a bit of biography on George Fitzhugh? I mean, you know, I'm wondering, I don't know too much about his personal details of his life, but I'm wondering what sort of life does somebody have to have to come out as terrible as George Fitzhugh was? Right. Right. And Fitzhugh is a classic eccentric. And you can kind of see that in the way that he focuses on his writing. So he's obsessed with slavery. But his background is kind of this oddball that he's self-taught mostly, has a little bit of formal education, but he's a deep reader of books, has a massive library reportedly in his house, and he would kind of descend into just intellectual engagement with all the material that he could swallow up. So he is an autodidact in that sense. He's trained as a lawyer, and he actually marries into a modest amount of wealth with his wife, so she brings an estate in. The estate has basically a couple of slaves and a very large mansion in Port Royal, Virginia, which is where he ends up spending most of his life. But all his contemporaries report him as someone who kind of withdraws from social scenes, is often found sitting around in his library in his house absorbing books. He does a variety of odd jobs throughout the years to bring in little sources of income, including working for the federal government. At points he would serve as a judge or offer his services as an attorney to various government actors. And this persists from the antebellum period through the Civil War. He goes into the service of the Confederate government. And then after the Civil War, an oddity of oddities, he actually does a little bit of legal work for the Freedmen's Bureau, although he's still very much in a hostile perspective to the freed blacks after the war. But you can think of him as just a bit of a dilettante who moved from odd job to odd job, had enough money to basically survive and descend into his books. And then just over the years, he takes up pamphleteering, and pamphleteering moves into journalism. Journalism moves into publishing these more substantive works. He comes up with two books over the course of his career. And I guess we can get into some of the content of those. But one thing I will say that keeps coming up as a theme over and over again of people who meet him is they always remark on what an odd character he is. So one of the classic stories is he lived in this massive mansion that was inherited through his wife's family, and he apparently allowed it to just go into shambles, never kept it up. And observers, visitors would come to see him and he'd be sitting there reading his books and there'd be like bats flying out of the attic and stuff. And he's apparently unfazed by this. So just a classic type of an eccentric character. And I think that really frames some of the intellectual direction his life takes. That fall of the House of Usher type scenario is pretty great.  Just a couple points of clarification. Was he ever at any point what would be considered a planter? So he's definitely not like a plantation style manager of the house. I think the best records we have is through his wife's family. He has maybe nine or 10 slaves at any given point, but he uses them mostly for domestic servants and smaller tasks like that. So in terms of actually doing employment, most of it comes from either odds and ends that he can gather from writing or just services an attorney from time to time and usually falling into various political patronage jobs. But that also puts him in the largest class of slave owners in the south, right?  Yeah, he's very much, yeah, yeah, very much so. What kind of impact do you think that had on the development of his ideas?   Right. So he's in the middle. I wonder what effect does that have on his thought? Well, he certainly sees himself as kind of like the paternalistic patriarch of the household. His view of slavery on a personal level, his relationship to slavery is almost always emphasizing the role of servitude is kind of a guiding mechanism is perverse to sound to the moral life. He sees the master as someone who provides the order for those that in their natural free state would just be in chaos. And it's very much a harkening back to kind of a feudal lord with the serf underneath him type of a view of the structuring of society. And he draws very heavily on that. He's almost obsessively reading about the medieval era whenever he can get books on that subject. And he sees slavery is almost a direct descendant of that and a modernization of that. What kind of literature did he like to read? Was was he reading Walter Scott and, you know, romantic poets or did he stick to outdated old literature from the period that he loved so much? Right, right. So off the top of my head, I haven't seen any references directly to Scott, although that's that's certainly something that's in the air of the old South, the romanticism of medieval times, Ivan Ho, that type of stuff. I can't say with certainty to the degree that that Fitzhugh drew on that. And actually, most of the reading that he cites and references is of a nonfiction type with one very clear exception we can get into. And that's he he is obsessed with Thomas Carlisle, who is both a fiction writer and a historian. And he sees these Carlisle's fiction is very compatible with Carlisle's philosophical and historical writing. Now, this obsession with the medieval world and with with the patriarchal elements of surfdom and lordship really, really fascinate me in Fitzhugh's thought, because I find it some of the most challenging elements to a libertarian, because I think especially with the influence of somebody like Hans Hoppe and his book Democracy, the God that Failed, like we do recognize that democracy in all sorts of ways is a step backward from certain things about medieval life. And then there are also the left libertarians who point to the king's corporate charters as the growth of capitalism or enclosure by the aristocrats. And you know, medieval life was a lot more free and libertarian in a lot of ways and you know, free libertarian peoples could live alongside the world of lords and serfs who are bound to the land. So there's, you know, there are all sorts of challenging elements in Fitzhugh's presentation of the medieval period as this this grand time of great patriarchs. So I wonder if you could just fill in what is his intellectual heritage?  I almost see Fitzhugh as kind of the anti Deirdre McCloskey in a Deirdre's whole thesis is about an emergent cultural intellectual shift that occurs that breaks humanity effectively out of this surfdom master relationship. It's the the dignity of the merchant class that's emergent and whereas McCloskey would celebrate that is something that opens up new opportunities for people that never had them again opens up new freedoms. Fitzhugh looks at this and sees in horror that it's like this instrument of chaos that's happening. It's upending the order of society. So as he's kind of doing his intellectual journey, his putting together his his theories, he's drawing on whatever he can grab on to as kind of a claim of institutional stability that he can pull from the past. And yet the oddity of it is he merges this with with some really radical political economy. So some of the other references that you find throughout his texts over the years, he's very well read in the socialists and utopian communists of the era, the pre-marks end of the radical left. So people like Robert Owen is a very frequent reference in Fitzhugh's work. So he's almost merging this idealized study of medieval history with a radical political economy that's coming out of the far left and saying that the two unite very symptomatically of the modern industrial age. They unite in ways that particular authors, say in the communist socialist world or particular authors in this reactionary harkening back to the old idealized medieval state would not recognize of each other. And he sees himself as kind of this bridge figure between the two literatures. So let's let's dig into what he thought was so admirable about the feudal system and also Catholicism, which I find also strange. It's an outlier from this period for somebody to have so much effusive praise for the Catholic church and its hierarchies. But Fitzhugh definitely does. What did he find valuable about the feudal relationship? That's the hierarchical structure. It is a paternalistic way of looking at life. So and this is where Fitzhugh draws something very strongly from the left. His economic theory is all about worker exploitation. It's all about looking and seeing the lower classes of society. Obviously the slaves are the foremost example in his day, but he sees white laborers as also exploited and his vision of kind of the relationship of those those laborers to capitalism. He sees them as come almost captive to this exploitative system in a very proto-Marxian way. And he sees the older feudal system as a displaced parent, something that in a previous age would have protected these people, would have also provided order to their lives and done so with a strong hand. So he's very accepting of the brutality of the system, but he sees the master-slave relationship as very analogous to the Lord-Surf relationship. He also sees this as something that is directly paralleled in historical religious structures. So there's where Catholicism comes in. Being a hierarchical church, being something that is ordered around very clear relationships from the Pope all the way down to the bishop to the local parish priest. He sees this as a structured ordering that can step in and almost offer that paternalistic guidance to the the chaos of life unchanged from any sort of institutional order. So to him, Catholicism is not so much a religious attraction that pulls him in that direction. He looks at the structure of the church. He sees a centralized body with diffusing rungs of order beneath them. And he sees that as a proper way to disseminate moral instruction, very similar to the way that a properly situated Lord or noblemen would disseminate moral instruction to the workers that are underneath him on his farm or his estate in Medieval England. What were his religious views? I mean, you read his books. And there's a matter of sincerity that's always at play and fits you. And he'll go through some of the nods from time to time in his journalism and his writing to indicate, you know, appeals to Christianity and in a very vague sense, but you're never quite sure how serious he is. He doesn't seem to be an overly religious man, like he's not visibly praying out in public or any of that that type of thing. He makes references to it. He's well read in elements of religion and theology. But there's always this question of sincerity. Does he view this as a true belief? Probably not. Does he view this as a tool that's very compatible with his way of looking at the world and one of many possible tools? So something that's very parallel to the the noblemen-serve relationship as well. That's more likely the case, at least how I'd interpret it in viewing him religiously. Yeah, I kind of had the same sense. He seems sort of like a like a Straussian in that he might not really believe the things that he's saying, but the myth is more important. It's important that you believe that he believes what he's saying, you know? So he might not think a word of this Christianity Bible stuff is true, but that's not important because it has social power to it. And that's what he's concerned about managing, like a good patriarch. Oh, absolutely. And it's a and even before Strauss, and I don't want to malign them too much. And others have a complex view of the Straussians myself, interesting political philosophy. But this is a Carlisleian theme as well. If you look in Carlisle's text, he's constantly the trickster and he almost takes joy in in playing with words in playing with concepts and not quite fully revealing his deck of cards or his hand of cards to the world. He's not showing his true belief so much as he's taking concepts and using them to prod the reader in a certain direction. And you're never quite sure what is the true personal Carlisle coming through or what is actually just word smithing and conceptual use to try and drive a conversation in a direction he wants it to go. And Fitzhugh absolutely picks up on this style. He's almost an outrage artist. He glorifies and himself and the fact that his writings provoke such a vicious backlash in the north. He almost relishes in at least unusual in this sense compared to the other proslavery writers. They view themselves as the enemy of the northern people. They view themselves as someone who would never associate with a Yankee. Fitzhugh is almost the opposite of that. He wants to associate with the Yankee so he can kind of throw himself into the ring and batter them around with his outrageous of a proposition he can put forth and just to see their reaction. So he absolutely loves that publicity that he gets from it. Almost like a 19th century version of an internet troll in a sense. You know, so I want to come back to this thread later. But it strikes me that he's also very familiar or very similar to Sir Robert Filmer in his writings, which was John Locke's great enemy. Right. You know, it's been it's been commented that Fitzhugh was the one person in American history who genuinely preferred Sir Robert Filmer to John Locke. And I mean, it seems to me that throughout Filmer you also get somebody who doesn't really seem like they believe what they're saying, but they got to make the case the best way that they can. And so they'll use evidence that they think people will find convincing. Right, right. One of the themes you see in both of Fitzhugh's books and you see several of his journalism outputs is he's constantly bashing, beating up on Locke. He sees Locke as kind of the fountainhead of both the political philosophy that tears down feudal feudalism. So he's actually concerned more so with Locke's first treatise in the sense that a second treatise, the first treatise is the one that that digs into an attack on the divine right of kings. We kind of see it as antiquated as compared to the social contract that comes out of the second treatise in government. But Fitzhugh dislikes both of them and he tears into them constantly. He views Locke as the destabilizing political mechanism of the old feudal order. But he also views Locke as kind of the fountainhead of this market thinking that he despises. So he sees a direct trajectory and intellectual trajectory from Locke to someone like Adam Smith, who is the other great enemy that emerges in his work. You take someone like Filmer and actually Fitzhugh does not refer to Filmerl that much. So it's something that historians have commented on. They've recognized a parallel in their way of thinking. But what it comes out as, as, you know, Filmer adopts this paternalistic outlook, very similar. He's a defender of the king, the monarchy and the successive orders of society as providing moral instruction, providing order to the world. So Fitzhugh, in a sense, is almost copying and updating that way of thinking. You know, this is a late 17th century type of a doctrine he's saying, well, we can take it to the 19th century and oh, we have this modernized system of slavery that's our next state in the historical evolutionary trajectory. So you slavery is the paternalistic mechanism that sustains this type of ordering and moral instruction for life that's been displaced by the evils that he sees in the Lockean system.  He's not, he makes no bones about that. He really has contempt for philosophers. And it's interesting to me that he seems to have much more high regard for historians, like Carlisle or Marx. Right, Carlisle first and foremost among them. Yeah. And I mean, Marx, who was first and foremost a historian, right?  So, you know, there's some value to him there. There's a low bar of the curb. That's true. But, you know, there's this divide in Fiziu. He hates philosophers, but he loves the down-to-earth historians who get into the details of human experience. And all of that stuff really makes a difference to his way of thinking. Now, back to Locke, though, that time period of enclosure and people being displaced to the countryside, the rise of wage labor, the rise of Lockeian philosophy, that's the beginning of chaos for him and kind of this messy middle period in history in between, you know, grand patriarchy, of feudal period and the slavery period. There's this awful, mucky, free society period in between. So, tell us about Fiziu's idea that free society is a failure. Right, right. This is where kind of the Fiziu is the anti-McCloskey comes into full view. He sees horror in the opportunity that's afforded by especially economic freedom, but freedom in general. He sees nothing but a disruption and overturning of the old system and with it a moral breakdown that comes out. Because remember, his core theory is that the feudal lord not only provides order to society, but provides moral instruction down to people who he sees as almost, you know, free and wild when left to their own devices. And he's horrified by that. So he views the lord as someone providing moral instruction. He sees the slave master, someone providing moral instruction there. So this is kind of an ethical view that sees emergent, I guess we would call it capitalism today, but really a market system as ethically destructive. So the antithesis of almost anything that a modern libertarian theorist would refer to when talking about the inherent morality of free exchange. Fiziu sees this as kind of the complete destruction of morality. So there's that tension at play. He is historically minded in the sense that he's obsessed with reading accounts of what's going on in the ground. He almost prefers this to anything in the fictional world. So he studies accounts of factory conditions in England in particular. He looks at accounts of political upheaval. So he's quite fond of Carlisle. Carlisle's big work is his history of the French Revolution. So that she was reading that, absorbing it at the same time. Seeing this is kind of a way of peaking in demand. So is to look through historical accounts. One of the oddities of his study of industrialization is he draws on quite a few of the same sources that Karl Marx does about a decade later. And C. Van Woodward, the great historian of the South, who added a series of, actually put one of Fiziu's books back into print and did a very critical interpretive essay of it. He points out that Fiziu's analytical process of studying factories, studying worker conditions through historical documents is almost identical to the process that you find in Karl Marx. And on top of that, they reach more or less the same conclusion with their own individual twists at the end. So the approach is very similar to Marx. The material he's using is very similar to Marx in quite a few of the conclusions are the same. Yeah, I mean, he uses the very first chapter in sociology for the South to attack free trade. And that's where he builds the rest of his case from there. And there's this very, very important line from there. Political economy is the science of free society and socialism is the science of slavery. Talk to us about that a little bit. Right. And so this book comes out. It's his first major track. He's been writing journalism for a couple of years before that and put forth arguments in favor of slavery. But the title is The Sociology for the South. And the subtitle of the book, though, is almost more fascinating. The subtitle is The Failure of a Free Society. So take that in for a moment. What's he referring to is the failure of a free society. He's actually referring to market capitalism or what we call market capitalism. He's referring to the Manchester emergent school free trade that's coming out of the United Kingdom. So he doesn't go into so much by name attacking someone like Richard Cobden. But that's very much in the political air. So 1846 is when Britain repeals the corn laws. It's it's entire protective system that had upheld high tariffs, effectively on food items in the United Kingdom. So it's a protectionist mechanism to sustain largely and owners in Britain by keeping them in farm production, even though Britain's a really inhospitable climate to to grow wheat and corn in farm products. But the idea is to sustain that market will fit you views. This this emergence in human history, this introduction of free trade is something that further destabilizes the land holding class. It's kind of the the last death blow against the old estate holders of the feudal medieval order that had remained in England. Because if you look at what the effect of protectionism was prior to the repeal of the corn laws, it actually kept several of these largest states relatively profitable internal to England through artificially sustained agriculture prices caused by the tariffs. And you remove that. What happens trade enters in more efficient, more effective production mechanisms in better climates and far flung regions of the world start competing with those old landowners and those estate holders in England. It makes them no longer profitable. There you have an entire collapse of the the last remnant of the feudal holdover. So he sees free trade as as one of the greatest threats of modern society at his age. He sees Manchester liberalism as breaking down the very last remnants we have of feudalism. He also sees it as being in direct competition with the system, the economic system he's espousing based on using slavery to supplant and restore the feudal order for a very specific reason. If you go back to economists from Adam Smith forward that are writing in that era of classical economists, almost all of them touch upon the problem of slavery and they do so through economic reasoning. There's also moral cases that Adam Smith makes with this major famous contribution on slavery. As he notes that, you know, using a Cedars parable assumption, slavery versus free labor, they're put side by side. Free labor will outcompete and be more efficient than slavery because there are certain incentive structures in place. If you're a free laborer, you have an incentive to improve upon your product, improve your skill sets, maybe innovate, offer something new that makes your productive process more efficient.  It's do your work or you're going to get whipped at the end of the day. And Smith is arguing that one is a driver of efficiency. The other is it's kind of this retrograde, politically sustained system. So Fitzhugh sees this Smithian philosophy as directly antithetical to the slave order he wants to uphold. He actually declares at several points. It says these market thinkers are at war with slavery. They view slavery as something inefficient to be driven from the market. I view something. I view slavery as something that is the sustainer of order and moral instruction society. So he sees the two systems is entirely incompatible. And this really becomes kind of the fountain of Fitzhugh's exploration into market theory, which he views as totally destructive to everything that he believes. So that's why he really starts out with attacking free trade as the forefront of the enemy, of the anti-slavery enemy that he's going after in his book. And it is right there on the very first page. It's the first chapter is this tirade against free trade. But it's also a theme he carries through to his other works. He actually argues for an elaborate kind of mercantilist price management tier of system to be imposed and sees this as the all permanent mechanism to industrialize the South. And after industrializing the South, what you do use the slave labor system to sustain and fill the worker positions in that industry. You know, I'd love that you say he's the anti-deer Dromaklusky because what he said, what he had to say about Benjamin Franklin also really leapt out to me. He said, Franklin was the best exponent of free society. And he says his sentiments and his philosophy are low, selfish, atheistic and material. And, you know, Franklin is looked at as one of the best representatives of American bourgeois values and virtues. But it's this constant competition that so bothers Fitzhugh.  And the world of the modern period is one of constant competition of everybody against everybody. It's, you know, Hobbes' state of nature, run wild over the whole planet with no end in sight either, I guess, until everything burns down. And people like him build it back up with their slaves. Right. Right.  It's a destruction of order. And you have Franklin, who's someone who's like the champion of self-improvement. Franklin is someone who's basically the champion of the self-made man of this more egalitarian philosophy and equality of opportunity as a mechanism to improve yourself to seek out your best industry, to seek out your best tasks.  Here's your instruction on how to be a good serve to the best of your ability. So there's a very core tension there. It also doesn't help that Franklin of the founding generation is one of the more anti-slavery figures. So there's a very obvious tension there between what Fitzhughian wants as an ordering basis of society versus what Franklin kind of writes into the fabric of the American tradition as as having a freedom is at odds with slavery. I work in philosophy. Now, throughout sociology for the South and cannibals, all he compares people to all sorts of different kinds of animals. He says that we should have societies more like bees and ants where their social structures are sculpted by nature and not sort of created by society itself and the choices of individuals. And according to their preferences, no, we should have it given to us like, you know, through the genetics of sort of like bees and ants. He says that, you know, he it's interesting where he does not discriminate in the way that we might think a 19th century pro-slavery author would. He's not racist in the ways that we think he might be racist. He's not sexist in the ways that we might think he would be sexist. He is both of those things, but not the way we would. So like he says, he's well, he says both. Yeah, it's very strange. So like, for example, he says both the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman conquest and Native Americans were in pretty much the same social situation. They were more like, he says, Bengal tigers than men. He also uses other animals like owls, wolves, lions, cattle on the pompous, horses, oxen, sheep. And he says good slaves are like faithful dogs. Yeah. And so, but it's not a race. It's not an issue of race for him, right? Right, right. Yeah, and he, I guess to clarify, so Fitzhugh is absolutely racist in the sense that he views black people as kind of inferior in their evolutionary origin. He constantly refers to black people as childlike, but he universalizes this same type of a sentiment. So Fitzhugh's odd in the sense he argues that slavery can be extended to the entire society. He argues that slavery, though racial in its ordering in the South, and he sees that as proper. So he adheres to a racist vision in the sense that he sees black people was kind of the equivalent of the drone in hints or drone bees, the very lowest rung of the colony. And there are absolutely racial prejudices that leave him to believe that. But he also sees other people in society also sees other workers, including white workers, as potential subjects that can be enslaved. He actually talks about in some of his texts, he gets into very odd theories where he says the the proper Southern gentleman, the proper Southern landowner or aristocrat could give similar instruction of such a nature that would even redeem the Yankee children. And he goes through kind of this elaborate scheme. He says that despite so he hates the Yankees, he hates Northerners, sees them as intellectually corrupted by this philosophy of freedom and actually corrupted by other things. But he says, you know, even a Yankee child is put into the proper instruction of slavery at a young age could be brought up to be a productive and contributing member of a slave society, contributing member of a factor. And he sees this as kind of a moral redemption to Yankeeism that he's always railing against. But he's very much talking about white laborers as well as being subject to slavery. So it's taking a lot of the prejudices of his era that were other theorists would apply to black people and do on racial lines. And he does accept that element of it, but he tries to universalize it as an ordering system for all of society. It strikes me as very similar to the way he handles feminism, which was another one of the crazy radical isms that he saw springing up everywhere in free societies.  He talks about how the Turk and the Chinese venerate women as idols and they bind their feet and destroy their bodies as a way of worshiping them. And that's a good thing. And he talks about how, you know, good slaves have feminine virtues.  But, you know, I'm more interested in to what degree are modern academics now doing George Fitzhugh's work for him in making socialism and slavery popular again together? Right, right. And it's almost unwitting in this. And so I make this argument along the economic lines. So economics is the clearest area where Fitzhughian philosophy is almost subversively survived. And the reason for this is because he's so close to Marx. He has this very hierarchical, paternalistic outlook of social ordering, which tends to get him cast as like this conservative reactionary type. But his political economy is outwardly radical. It's proto-Marxist in nature. He, you know, we've already talked about he considers slavery is the purest form of socialism. He says this over and over again. And then when you get into the particulars, if you were to ask Fitzhugh, how would you design an economy for the South? He'd say, well, we need price controls and tariffs. We need state intervention in the industry. Subsidy industrialization program, something that you could very much see Fitzhugh in another century being kind of a Dastalan character or an advisor to Stalin, who has a five-year plan for industrialization of the sector of the economy. Mandatory public education, right? Right, right. And he's hinting in this direction in some of his commentary on industrialization in the South. He sees the South as virtuous in its acceptance of slavery, but deficient in its failure to mobilize its economy in a managed industrial direction. So he has this entire system of central planning that he espouses. And he sees this on a very communistic basis. One of the things he's constantly railing against is wage slavery. He uses terms very much in ways that we could recognize a Marxist today doing it. So he's talking about the industry of the North subjects people to wage slavery. It does so by alienating them from the product of their labor. So here again, we have a Marxist doctrine that enters into the equation and probably the most pronounced parallel is he develops a theory of exploitation, a theory of capital based on exploitation. He sees capital ownership, capital acquisition is kind of a theft, an exploitative theft of the product of the laborers. So it's straight up leading into a Marxist-like system that he's planned out as his explanation for the economy he sees around him. Now, his prescriptive solution is slightly different, I guess you could say, than what a Marxist would go today. They don't advocate slavery for a very good reason unless you are considering something like enslavement of the Soviet state and the hardline Stalinist version. But Fitzhugh, his diagnosis is a very left wing political economy. And what this does in his own age, especially the writing in the late 1840s, early 1850s, when he's kind of at the height of his influence, he's diagnosing the industrial problems of the South as a deficiency of central planning. And what you have today, this is where I draw the parallels. I'd argue that Fitzhughian political economy has almost been unwittingly reinvented and adapted minus, of course, the overt celebration of slavery. But Fitzhughian political economy viewing this era as industrially deficient and subject to wage labor exploitation. This is something we've seen in a whole genre of the historical literatures, referred to as the new history of capitalism. It's popped up in, say, the last 10 years or so. And what you have is these modern theories that take Marxist precepts. A lot of them come straight out of the political left and they're very sympathetic. To all the building blocks of the Fitzhughian system minus slavery. So they view diagnostically the industrial situation of the mid-19th century almost identical. It's a situation of labor exploitation. They see slavery introduced into this as a further continuation of that exploitation. So there's the break from Fitzhughian. And then foremost among it is they see the Southern economy, and especially the crops like cotton as the building block and driver of the industrial world. So the late antebellum was famous for its introduction of something known as the cotton thesis or the king cotton thesis. Everyone learns about this. And even like high school history books of Southerners who see the cotton industry as the core driver of not just their own regional economy, but the world economy. Because textiles come from it. It's a major component of shipping. A major component of finance is devoted to the production and sustenance of cotton. And the idea that the Southerners had at the time was that if you disrupt the cotton trade, if you break down the plantation system, it'll send the entire world economy into basically a depression or an economic collapse. Because they thought cotton was that important, that central to everything that the world economic production would depend on it. Fitz used very sympathetic to this kind of an approach in the sense that he sees Southern productivity and output as a major raw material building block for this industrialization scheme that he wants. And what we've had is modern historians that look at the economy of cotton and the economy of slavery and the late antebellum have actually fallen very susceptible into kind of believing the nonsense, believing this notion that cotton was indeed what all these Southerners were counting it as. And it's the central building block of the entire world economy. So they've almost unwittingly revived an element of the King Cotton thesis and used it as an interpretation of economic history minus the enthusiasm for slavery that you find in someone like Fitz you or his other contemporaries. So it's a really odd development in the modern literature. But so what even to the point you could you could go into Fitz's book like the animals all where he lists all of his industrial prescriptions. He lists all of his ideas of what you do to fix the economy of the South. And you put it side by side with some of the diagnostic claims of late antebellum economic health by someone like Sven Becker or Ed Baptist. And they're all talking about the same things. Industrialization teams, tearouts, managed trade, centralized economy. The only difference being that you go to someone like Fitz you have the enthusiasm for slavery.  But the economic diagnosis is almost identical. Well, I'll agree with you that I think modern day historians definitely hate slavery. But let's also close by remembering what Fitz you himself said about government. All government is slavery. And he absolutely love government, absolutely love slavery. And you know, I'll add on that note. Fitz you does continue writing after the Civil War. And it's mostly in what we consider the equivalent of an op-ed today. So short journalistic pieces. And there's kind of been this tendency in the history profession. They see Fitz you as very time to the late antebellum civil war era. Slavery is abolishing and kind of fades off into the distance. No, that's not true at all. He actually continues writing and he keeps picking up on theme after theme after theme railing against the philosophy of a free society, railing against the deficiencies of government action in that free society and railing against the failure to properly order and control and design an economy around it. Even now the slavery is gone by the wayside through emancipation of the Civil War action. So he still claims to this philosophy even to the extent that he actually starts celebrating elements of the state. He says, you know, if there are going to be capital owners, it might as well be the state. That's the capital owner because that's the true slavery in society. This is how we can have slavery after slavery or some of the benefits that he saw in slavery after slavery itself as a formal institution had been abolished. Phil Magnus is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economics Research and I wanted to close with a bit of historiography. Lewis Hartz was that historian who famously argued that all of American political and intellectual history has been based on John Locke. He said that the Lockean consensus was so vast in sweeping that socialism never really had a chance here. He identified George Fitzhugh as the lone outsider in all of American history who genuinely preferred Sir Robert Filmer to John Locke. But something about this strikes me as deeply wrong. Consider just how much Fitzhugh said that is now echoed by mainstream academia or even some of the things he said that libertarians would love, like remember that line, all government is slavery. In fact, it seems that Fitzhugh spoke for the progressive future and much of 20th century thought while it was not based in Fitzhugh, he did prefigure it and that is a deeply disturbing prospect.


OK, can we start? Let's begin by throwing some ideas around. I've already given it some thought and I think it would be a good idea to have a retrospective of pop art. There's a revival of interest in it at the moment. How about an Andy Warhol retrospective? As far as I know, he's never been to Hong Kong. We could make it multimedia and show some of his films at the same time. Then we'd have to work with other venues. Not necessarily. We could have a screening room in the exhibition centre. Would it be worth it for one exhibition? I wasn't thinking of making it a one-off. We could make it a permanent feature. I'm having an architects meeting next week. I could bring it up then and see how they feel. It would add to the cost, of course. We are going a bit off the point here. Let's focus on content. I like the idea of product design exhibition like kitchen things. That would cover utensils, food packaging, advertising. How about an exhibition of successful adverts over the years? That would combine graphics, photography and film and make more use of a screening room. Or posters. How about posters from the 1930s up to now? Movie posters. Let's get back to art. As far as I know, Nguyen in Hong Kong has done an exhibition of digital art, which seems strange to me as it's getting more and more mainstream. I like the idea of a photography exhibition showing local photographers. Maybe photojournalism or iconic buildings in Hong Kong or just portraits. We're getting lots of ideas here, but not really getting anywhere. Let's consolidate what we've got so far. Okay. Andy Warhol retrospective. Pop art. Product design, kitchens. It doesn't have to be kitchens. It could be anything. Okay. Product design, anything. Adverts, posters, photography. Digital art. Going back to Andy Warhol, let's be realistic. We haven't got the budget for an exhibition of the best known works. And if we can only afford the lesser known ones, I'm asking myself, what's the point? We could certainly run a season of his films. On its own, how would that make us different from Agnes B or any other art house cinema in Hong Kong? Let's leave him in the running for now. How about the product design idea? I'd be in favour of using local designers and keeping it Hong Kong based. I think that's too parochial. Well, we could open it up to China. That'll attract the tourists. I'm going to have to go. I've got another meeting. We seem to have gone round in circles without making any decisions. Are you free for another meeting next week? How about Tuesday? No problem for me, Brenda. Fine, as far as I know. I'll get Sandy Descendant e-mail. Meanwhile, can I suggest we all give it some thought, so we at least have some kind of shortlist before we start?


The influence of the Squatter Man event is the foundation for everything, from the earliest of times an assimilation of thought occurs where physical documentation is scarce, when the mind stands alone in remembrance, when the remembrance then becomes a distant event, and the memory stretches our imaginations to the breaking point. The stories that reach us today from the earliest of times are perceptions, a descriptive pattern of the thoughts of the ancients using story to remember actual events, and when the events become memories, when the original observers are now part of the story, questions arise, belief becomes a challenge, and we are asked as a people to show faith in the past events that we are not around to observe ourselves. The ancient stories are a message, an effort to reach across time to tell our future people of past events, a way to gently explain the things that had happened, and these ancient people have left us for us to interpret. It is now up to us to trust these efforts, to interpret these perceptions, to understand the past so we can better prepare for our future. Stories such as the Anuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh give us much more than their own reflections on evil. In many ways, they set out the terms on which later texts, thinkers and writers will debate these questions. Anuma Elish is the dualistic background against which the Genesis creation myth is written, and the dualism of the Anuma Elish will continue to haunt the Ibramic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as a shadow, a rival to their own stories of how the world began and from whence these thoughts originally manifested. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first recorded human attempt to understand and inhabit a world where suffering happens. The world that once was has vanished, replaced by a great assembly in the sky. The epic is composed in Akkadian out of much earlier Sumerian myths of which fragments have been discovered that date to beyond 2400 BC. In Akkadian, the title of the epic is He Who Saw the Deep, and to see the deep means to see something deep about the human experience. Even in the Akkadian text, people understood that the Epic of Gilgamesh was an incredibly profound event witnessed during a time of disastrous confusion. Gilgamesh is a hard king over the citizens of his city. Uruk, and to stop him from being so oppressive towards his citizens, the gods create Enkeder as Gilgamesh's equal. And so Enkeder is going to be Gilgamesh's friend, though he is called part animal and part human, whereas Gilgamesh is part god and part human. Theirs is the story of a great friendship. When they fight, they realise that they are well matched and become inseparable.  They travel to the Cedar Mountain, probably in Lebanon, and defeat Humbaba, the ogreish guardian of the mountain. They kill the Bull of Heaven, who was sent by the goddess Ishtar to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her seduction. But this murder of the Bull of Heaven doesn't go down well with the other gods in the sky, and so they kill Enkeder as punishment. At the death of his friend, Gilgamesh is distraught. He's also terrified of death, realising it will come to him one day, just as it did Enkeder. So, to assuage his grief and palliate his fear, he undertakes a quest to find the key to immortality, by undertaking a long and perilous journey to meet the ancient and immortal flood hero Uttanapishtam. After many difficulties, he finally meets the man face to face, but the man is now old, he's unwilling or unable to help, and tells Gilgamesh this, The life that you are seeking, you will never find. When the gods created man, they allotted him to death, but life, they retained in their own keeping. As expected, Gilgamesh's efforts do eventually fail, and he collapses weeping in grief for his beloved friend. He then returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls prompts him to praise this enduring work, work solely of the human hands. Perhaps this recognition of the achievement of the human effort is a sign that Gilgamesh has begun to find a way out of this bitter despair.  Gilgamesh's journey are, in this way, an allegory for every human's journey through life. There comes a moment in every person's life when we know that death is now our future, and then we must decide what to do with that knowledge. He who saw the deep may refer to a deeper understanding rather than looking into the deep, or perhaps it's the earth that is the deep, and if that is the case, then the setting takes place in the sky. At the moment of the realisation of human achievement, Gilgamesh seeks to worship the gods in the sky. You have to wonder about the physical reality on this planet during these times of catastrophic fear, but would you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.