[PEN-L:5006] Richard Hofstadter on the uses of demonization

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Richard Hofstadter, *America at 1750: A Social Portrait*,
pp. 106-107:

     It has to be remembered, when we consider the English during the
     period when they were beginning to have numerous contacts with
     Africans, that we are dealing first with the Elizabethan men and
     then with men of the era of the Great Rebellion --- that is, with
     the English in one of the most tumultuous, aggressive, and
     triumphant phases of their history, an expanding and militant
     people with a curious mixture of intense sensitivity, robust
     violence, deep moral persuasion, and acute rapacity, men who were
     living in the throes of religious rebellions and wars, violent
     political and religious prejudices, civil insurrection, fierce
     persecutions, rising national vendettas, and enormous destructive
     energy. Moreover, there was little at work in England, or
     anywhere in western Europe, to counter the most primitive
     ethnocentric impulses. There was not, of course, and would not be
     for centuries, any intellectual countertradition of cultural
     relativism --- an enormously sophisticated and very modern idea
     --- to check the welling tide of brute prejudice. And, what is of
     still greater importance, there was, despite some flickering and
     stirrings in the Church, no strong cultivated tradition of
     humanitarianism to limit racial revulsion and bridle the drive
     toward human exploitation. A few white men who saw Benin may have
     been impressed by its grandeurs, and a few who bartered with
     Africans on the Guinea Coast may have known that they were
     dealing with formidable men. But like the Portuguese and
     Spaniards before them, the English were soon branding Africans,
     shunting them about like cattle, often in fact referring to them
     as such. The Negro as beast: it is always convenient and
     comfortable to believe that those who are about to be either
     killed or exploited mercilessly are something less than human,
     and hence available to be used for the benefit of humans. The
     dehumanization of the object is an important psychological
     precondition of destruction, and it is convenient to make the
     victim the embodiment of evil, indeed to project upon him one's
     own worst and most feared impulses, to make him an
     externalization of one's own beast. The primary limiting factor
     upon the white man in the long history of African slavery arose
     not out of humanitarian compunction but out of self-interest: the
     white man came not to destroy altogether, but to capture and
     sustain life, to be able to put it under virtually total
     domination for the sake of his own comfort or profit. His was a
     savagery contained chiefly by the desire to exploit; and his
     approach to the African built a historical monument of
     ruthlessness plastered over with condescension.

I particularly like "the dehumanization of the object is an important
psychological precondition of destruction", an ongoing effort in the
American imperialist undertaking.

This book, incidentally, as was Schumpeter's massive *History of
Economic Analysis*, was cut short by the death of the author and was
part of a planned 18-year project to write a three-volume history of
American political culture from 1750 onwards.  As someone who finds it
difficult to plan beyond tomorrow I admire this capacity greatly.

>From what I have heard Hofstadter is a "conservative".  This may be
true, but I find his conservatism, at least that evinced above, quite
palatable and a far cry from what passes for conservatism today.


Bill