The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought

A very well reasoned and fully fleshed out historic and critical analysis of all the key players of Agrarian thought, following them from the 20's to their modern day successors. Fully analyzes the core motivations of the Agrarians as a movement while still taking them to task individually for their philosophical and personal mistakes (racism, political opportunism, ideological inconsistency, etc), as well as how each individuals interpretation of what it meant to be an Agrarian evolved and changed over time.The last chapter in particular artfully contrasts Neo-Agrarian and likeminded modern offshoots to the original ideology, which puts the entire movement into clear and sharp relief.

A compelling narrative is only part of what makes this look at the most overlooked group of thinkers in American political history so gripping. Murphy introduces the novice to the thought of the Agrarians, a group of literary theorists and historians who gathered at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s. He provides a great overview of the context under which they wrote, an America in the throws of industrialization, urbanization, and post-World War I disillusionment.He then follows the Agrarians and their thought into the middle part of the twentieth century, demonstrating how the arguments made by John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Donald Davidson, et. al. in their famous collection of essays "I'll Take My Stand" contributed to the emergence of conservatism in the 1950s.In the most interesting portions of the book, Murphy discusses the fact that the Agrarians, clearly conservatives, actually presaged some of the themes we now associate with the left - such as the criticisms of modern society, the decline of community, etc.Good book. Worth your time if you are in the least bit interested in the evolution of American ideological thought and Southern intellectual history.