Not so long ago, the idea of studying American conservative thought would have seemed quaint because it was believed that there was none; we were all Jeffersonians, sharing in a grand liberal consensus, arguing merely about which brand of liberalism was best. Since 1968, however, conservatism has become "hegemonic." Devotees of the dreaded L-word pass their powerless days by counting the varieties of conservatism: business conservatives, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, libertarians, cultural conservatives, and the religious right. How can such an unwieldy coalition possibly persist, they wonder, and where did all these versions of conservatism come from anyway?
Paul Murphy has provided a fascinating and perceptive untangling of those threads of conservatism that can be traced back to the Agrarians, the Twelve Southerners centered at Vanderbilt University who voiced their dissent from modern, mass, urban, capitalist society in their famous 1930 manifesto, "I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition." Murphy traverses some of the territory covered by Michael O'Brien in his now classic examination of the Agrarians, The Idea of the American South, 1920–1940 (1979), but his major contribution is to follow the Agrarians and their ideas from the thirties to the present.
Since the Twelve Southerners who contributed to "I'll Take My Stand" did not really agree with each other about what "agrarianism" meant, it is not surprising that they followed radically different paths afterward. The intellectual father of the group, John Crowe Ransom, soon became absorbed in formal literary criticism and went off to Kenyon College to edit the influential Kenyon Review. Allen Tate's intellectual pursuits became more and more cosmopolitan, and he lost interest. Robert Penn Warren, after an historic stint helping to edit the Southern Review at Louisiana State University, teamed with Cleanth Brooks at Yale to fashion a textbook that instructed two generations of college students in the "new criticism," an oddly ahistorical way of understanding poetry. Warren also recanted his youthful segregationist views and went over to the enemy during the Civil Rights Movement.
Meanwhile, Donald Davidson was keeping the true flame burning brightly at Vanderbilt. His version of Agrarianism was not only particularistic and traditionalist; it was also frankly white supremacist. Davidson was a publicly active defender of racial segregation, as well as a polemicist inveighing against the Leviathan state.
The two most effective intellectuals of an agrarian persuasion in subsequent generations were Richard Weaver and M. E. Bradford. Weaver was an undergraduate at Vandy in the 1930s and spent most of his academic career as a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Bradford went to graduate school at Vanderbilt in the early 1960s specifically to burnish his conservatism. These two are primarily responsible for reshaping Agrarian philosophy, making it a critique of society and values rather than a complaint about the economy. It is an irony worthy of the long tradition of the South's serving the nation as foil and counterpoint that such an anticapitalist tract as "I'll Take My Stand" is the seedbed of conservative ideas that currently defend our capitalist economy.
Not only did Weaver and Bradford recast Agrarianism; they kept those ideas alive in the conservative subculture, and they connected those refashioned ideas to the contemporary movement through such journals as Chronicles and the Southern Partisan, as well as through friendly appearances in William Buckley's National Review. As Murphy points out, the National Review was the key synthesizer of modern American conservative thought.
Neoagrarianism, or paleoconservatism, is primarily a critique of liberal individualism from the vantage point of a mythic community that is hierarchical, traditional, orderly, organic, and religious. It decries modern society as anonymous, rootless, and transitory. The most easily excerpted value, and the one that is the common element among most of the many strands of conservatism observable today, is anti-statism: opposition to the "nanny state," as it is usually put. It would be churlish to point out inconsistencies, such as that the religious right wants the government to end abortions, the cultural right wants government schools to inculcate good character, business conservatives depend on the government for multiple services and protections as well as a supportive foreign policy, and so on. We don't seem to notice the government when it is doing something we want it to do. As the senior citizen in Florida said during the 2000 election when quizzed by a reporter about reforming the Social Security System, "I don't want the government to have anything to do with my Social Security."
Murphy ends his excellent book with an epilogue that presents two very different brands of neoagrarian thought. The first is exemplified by Wendell Berry, who is a real agrarian, a farmer and writer in Kentucky, to whom the Amish communities are the ideal. He stresses the particularism of the local community, conservation of the environment, organic connections not only among friends and neighbors, but between a person and what he produces for a living. Eugene Genovese, a leading historian, born in Brooklyn but now living in Atlanta, reflects the direction taken by a different kind of Agrarian. Genovese has made major contributions to our understanding of slavery and the antebellum South. He is a Marxist who has recently rejoined the Catholic Church and finds much to admire in what he portrays as the precapitalist culture of the antebellum planters. Among those admirable things is definitely not slavery, nor is Genovese patient with colleagues on the right who seem to be soft on racism. He does not ignore this flaw in Richard Weaver's influential essays, though he otherwise admires Weaver's philosophy. As Murphy points out, the consistent element of Genovese's curious journey from left-wing authoritarianism to right-wing traditionalism is that he has always opposed bourgeois liberalism.
For anyone interested in the South in the late twentieth century, contemporary conservatism, or attacks on capitalism from the right, this is an important book to read and a reliable guide through one of the more interesting chapters of American intellectual history.