Michael O'Brien has masterfully abridged his award-winning
two-volume intellectual history of the Old South,
Conjectures of
Order, depicting a culture that was simultaneously national,
postcolonial, and imperial, influenced by European intellectual
traditions, yet also deeply implicated in the making of the
American mind.
Here O'Brien succinctly and fluidly surveys the lives and works of
many significant Southern intellectuals, including John C. Calhoun,
Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Looking
over the period, O'Brien identifies a movement from Enlightenment
ideas of order to a Romanticism concerned with the ambivalences of
personal and social identity, and finally, by the 1850s, to an
early realist sensibility. He offers a new understanding of the
South by describing a place neither monolithic nor out of touch,
but conflicted, mobile, and ambitious to integrate modern
intellectual developments into its tense and idiosyncratic social
experience.