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THE SOUTHERN AGRARIANS, PROGRESS, AND THE TRAGIC VOICE
Author(s) -
Duncan Christopher M.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
politics and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.259
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1747-1346
pISSN - 1555-5623
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1346.2001.tb00582.x
Subject(s) - politics , agrarian society , sensibility , modernity , drama , argument (complex analysis) , literature , history , sociology , aesthetics , philosophy , law , political science , art , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , agriculture
In this argument the Agrarian role in the American political drama is not necessarily the specific one implied by the dichotomy: “Agrarian versus Industrial” (Twelve Southerners [1930] 1977, xxxviii), or the policist pronouncement“… that the culture of the soil is the best… and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers”(xlvii). Instead, this is an attempt to place them in a role similar to that played by Sophocles' Antigone—and Sophocles himself—juxtaposing them to the North's Creon. I argue that the Southern Agrarian “voice,” when heard properly, makes, possible the tragic sense, adjured by America's unequivocal attachment to modernity's gospel of progress. By positioning the Agrarians in such a way the goal is to point out a way of thinking about the political world, to create a sensibility that is only possible when their voice or another like it is heard properly and with its own timbre. If the project is successful, then two aims will be realized. First, the place and role of the Southern Agrarians in the history of American political thought will be made clearer. And secondly, the history of American political thought will have been employed in part as a kind of theoretical advocacy in the service of American political theory.