The representative Southerner, if there is such a creature, has generally been described somewhat like this: he is rural, conservative, religious, romantic. His thinking is concrete; he abhors abstraction. He looks backward, not forward; he distrusts institutionalized forms of truth—that dispensed by universities, newspapers, network news—and he hates reform, sociology, system-building, bureaucracy, and big government.

This portrait of the Southerner, though true enough in some particulars, seems to me far too limiting. It ignores that liberal-progressive strain in Southern thought running from one side of Jefferson through Walter Hines Page to Howard W. Odum and beyond. It neglects the fact that many Southerners, from Jefferson through Calhoun and George Fitzhugh to writers as self-consciously Southern as Thomas Nelson Page, have in various ways been committed to abstraction. What else but abstraction was the code by which the antebellum Southerner lived—a code that stressed honor, duty, and chivalry above all else? What else but abstraction was