This is a good review that tackles a subject that many historians shrink away from because it's embarrassing: the dingbat Confederate-nostalgic late-period writing of Eugene Genovese, one of America's greatest historians.
I suppose Gene Genovese, who went from being a Stalinist to a reactionary Catholic, is a good example of horse-shoe theory. More interestingly, I think he illustrates how powerfully the Cold War encouraged binary thinking.
The thread that connects Genovese's life is his tendency to sentimentalize societies that he saw as alternatives to capitalism, be it the Soviet Union or the slave-owning South. But under-girding that was an overemphasis of just how alternative these societies
Just as Genovese rejected the view (held by everyone from anarchists to Schactmanites) that the USSR was a system of state capitalism, so he also didn't see the slave south as integrated with American capitalism. That's probably the most vulnerable part of his work.
