By the 1850s an emerging southern social theory – newly dubbed “sociology” – defended slavery on higher ground than political economy allowed for. The new social theorists included the eminent scientist Joseph Le Conte as well as theologians, moral philosophers, and political theorists. Their work exposed the ultimate irreconcilability of political economy with a social philosophy appropriate to slaveholding society. Slavery reappeared again and again as the foundation of a society incompatible with the transatlantic world that political economists qua political economists interpreted and extolled.

Socialism

Proslavery theorists had to combat the widespread assumption that the fledgling discipline of sociology preached socialism. Throughout the South applause for socialism's exposure of the ills of free-labor society accompanied dread of socialist movements. Southern clergymen and laymen condemned socialism's principal philosophical, psychological, and economic premises but drew heavily on its critique of the free-labor system, which by the 1850s was beginning to be called “capitalism.” They also drew on radicals like William Godwin and Tories like Samuel Johnson to warn against the moral and physical dangers created by industrialization and the heavy concentration of population.