Fugitive Theory: Political Theory, the Southern Agrarians, and America. (Book Reviews).

Fugitive Theory: Political Theory, the Southern Agrarians, and America. By Christopher M. Duncan. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, c. 2000. Pp. xiv, 243. $63.00, ISBN 0-7391-0088-2.)

The Southern Agrarians were a group of poets and critics--most notably John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson--who, in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), established themselves as sharp critics of modern society, assailing the dehumanizing routine of modern labor and the meretricious consumer culture that was its reward. Christopher M. Duncan, a political scientist now at the University of Dayton, attempts to tease a communitarian politics out of their thought. Moreover, Agrarianism, he argues, constitutes a kind of Christian republicanism, a "subspecies" of the broader classical republican tradition (p. 12).

The book is a work in political theory, not history; three of the six chapters comprise an interpretation of the republican tradition. In them, Duncan elucidates his notion of Christian republicanism. Christian republicans, he argues, regarded luxury and materialism as evils and conceived of property as a means to virtuous citizenship rather than as an end in itself (a distinction borrowed from C. B. Macpherson). Duncan's overall theme is one of declension: Liberal theorists, who conceive of property as an end in itself, vanquished this republican tradition and the Christian nation he believes it supported. The older faith survived only in the South, as evidenced by the Scopes anti-evolution trial. The Agrarians become, in Duncan's account, among the final advocates of Christian republicanism, but a substantive discussion of Agrarianism only begins on page 140 of the 223-page text. Duncan views the Agrarians as sturdy Jeffersonian defenders of small property ("contextual Jeffersonians" [p. 160]) but also as moral theorists focused upon the "Fall of Man" (p. 178). They warned modern Americans against hubris--the belief that the world's problems will yield before human intellect.

Duncan's book is earnest and ingenuous, and his initial impulse to examine Agrarianism for traces of republican thought (the Agrarians were, after all, steeped in the classical curriculum typical of nineteenth-century southern preparatory academies) and for hints of modern communitarianism is worthwhile. But his conservative Christian politics distort his analysis, leading to a grossly simplified reading of republicanism, American history, and Agrarianism. In the 1930s the Agrarians did advocate a wide distribution of property, but this hardly made them classical republicans. Their most important intellectual influences were nineteenth-century romanticism, literary anti-modernism, regionalism, and by the decade of the Great Depression, Anglo-American distributism. It was only retrospectively that certain Agrarians, notably Tate and Davidson, reinterpreted their effort as a form of Christian humanism. Davidson was responsible for introducing the historical canard that the Agrarians were first motivated by disgust at northern reaction to the Scopes trial, a notion that misleads Duncan as it has many others.

Duncan's editors serve him poorly. The writing is often turgid and unclear; jarring colloquialisms and metaphors, unsupported analytical leaps, and perplexing sentences abound. The Agrarians did not seek wealth, power, or glory, Duncan writes at one point, "but rather the true republican independence and social-bond individualism that the irrational Locke with his Algeresque [read: Horatio Alger] social Darwinism and capitalist collectivism had all but vanquished from the realm of American political discourse" (p. 141). This sentence should not have survived an editor's scrutiny, but the intellectual confusion it reveals is ultimately the author's own responsibility.

PAUL V. MURPHY
Grand Valley State University