David Brion Davis - Moral Thinker

Moral Thinker

In his scholarship, Davis has been preoccupied with questions of evil, from homicide to slavery and racism. He has analyzed the historical circumstances and ideologies that gave rise to history's greatest horrors. He has sought to understand the ways cultures have "demonized" the Other; the bureaucratization of enslavement; and the relationship between collective violence and utopian and messianic ideals.

As a scholar and teacher, he has championed a conception of history built around five basic commitments. The first is to history with a moral dimension. He regards history as a moral enterprise, which seeks to understand the circumstances that allow evil to happen, how people as moral and intelligent as we could participate in the most horrendous moral evils, and how at certain historical moments, individuals were able to rise above their circumstances, address evil in fundamental ways, and expand moral consciousness. In his teaching as well as his scholarship, he has focused on various forms of oppressions, subtle as well as glaring, and the way that these have been rationalized and masked.

A second commitment is to a conception of culture as process—-a process involving conflict, resistance, invention, accommodation, appropriation, and, above all, power, including the power of ideas. Culture, in his view, involves a cacophony of voices but also social relations that involve hierarchy, exploitation, and resistance. This perspective has led many of his students to focus not on elites or intellectuals but on the values of slaves, artisans, and working-class women, for example, and the way they resisted economic and cultural oppression.

A third commitment is to the centrality of ideas. His is a history that emphasizes perception and meaning, both the meanings that people assigned at the time, and the meanings ascribed in retrospect. He pays especially close attention to religious ideas as the way most people throughout history have made sense of the world and their place in it.

At a time when the hegemony of social history was nearly complete, he continued to defend the importance of intellectual history. He rejected the idea that ideas should be treated as free floating entities that can be studied without reference to their social, economic, and political setting. But he insisted that ideas are indispensable to studying the past, because human beings have minds.

His fourth commitment is toward overcoming the parochialism of national histories. Only by bridging the boundaries of continents, nations, and time can people understand how the history of the United States fits into the large process of modernization. Only by situating United States history in a broader multinational frame and seeing the “big picture” can people understand broader issues of power and exploitation, the construction of race, and the nature and limits of social reform.

Fifth and finally, Davis sees the problem of slavery as central to any thorough understanding of the process of modernity. Slavery was not only indispensable to the emergence of modern consumer societies and the settlement and development of the New World, it was also connected to the rise of new notions of liberty and equality. He demonstrates that the struggle against slavery was part of a much broader revolution in intellectual and moral life, giving rise to new conceptions of autonomy and exploitation. In condemning slavery, abolitionists developed new notions of contract that radically reshaped attitudes toward poverty, labor relations, the Bible, and marriage.