by Racheal Fest

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

The absence of imagination had itself to be imagined.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things”

US academics have expanded “modernism.” In a founding PMLA article, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (2008) gather under the rubric “The New Modernist Studies” (NMS) a range of contemporary scholarly activities they argue expand both modernism’s canon and the methods scholars employ when they examine it. More recently, Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers (2015) consolidate these practices and give them a history in Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea. As a look at these documents of self-presentation reveals, scholars loosely affiliated with NMS often imagine their academic work opposes from the left contemporary forces that produce inequality in the US and beyond. This essay reviews these documents and asks whether or not the expansionist methods the New Modernist Studies endorses can fulfill the political desires its practitioners share. It takes up a version of the self-reflexive project Raymond Williams urged upon a previous generation of oppositional academics. “[C]ultural theory,” Williams wrote in 1986, “which takes all other cultural production as its appropriate material, cannot exempt itself from the most rigorous examination of its own social and historical situations and formations, or from a connected analysis of its assumptions, propositions, methods, and effects” (Williams [1986] 1989, 163). Williams encouraged critics, scholars, and historians of culture who believed they carried out radical work to train their field’s critical resources upon their own activities.

The New Modernist Studies deserves attention of this kind not only because its practitioners claim they have transformed the study of early-twentieth-century literary and cultural texts. NMS also typifies some of the guiding methods, values, and goals that animate contemporary literary studies across subfields. Because the study of literature in US universities emerged at once alongside and by way of the poems and novels we associate with modernism, NMS’s practitioners perform again for the present what has become a familiar scholarly gesture. To reflect upon the nature and value of modernism, critical histories of the term indicate, has been to reflect upon—and to make a case for one view of—the nature and value of academic and critical literary activity itself.[1] Although critics and scholars devoted primarily to this period no longer lead the profession, modernists share with others across subfields (and perhaps, disciplines) the hope that US academic activity might have broader social and political effects. Many also share the sense that a primary way to produce desired effects is to expand canons and revise conservative methods previous generations of literary critics established. If these common assumptions sometimes serve, rather than counter, the state and market interests that perpetuate contemporary inequality across economic and identity categories, as I suggest in what follows they may, the field might embrace alternative approaches across areas of specialization.[2] A troubling gulf separates the progress narratives left academics proliferate for a privileged audience of peers and students inside the US university from the narratives of increasing inequality that today pervade other domains of life in the US and beyond.[3] Recognizing this gulf might encourage oppositional critics to think beyond the self-regulating and self-justifying habits of professional life.

The New Modernist Studies

The New Modernist Studies, according to Mao and Walkowitz (2008), describes as “modernist” an increasingly broad set of materials. Over “the past decade or two,” they explain, “all period-centered areas of literary scholarship have broadened in scope,” and so “modernist literary scholarship” has likewise expanded in “temporal, spatial, and vertical directions” (737). Along a “temporal” axis, such scholars as Susan Stanford Friedman extend modernism’s reach beyond the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[4] Jahan Ramazani and others associated with a “transnational turn” (744) attempt to “make modernism less Eurocentric by including or focusing on literary production outside Western Europe” (739). Still others—those who expand scholarship along society and culture’s “vertical” axes—no longer understand modernism as “a movement by and for a certain kind of high (cultured mandarins) as against a certain kind of low” (738). These scholars examine “reportage,” “propaganda,” and “news” alongside artworks and objects of mass culture (746).[5]

Mao and Walkowitz suggest these diverse practices together constitute a common oppositional project. The New Modernist Studies aims to “disrupt” and alter the conservative methods for organizing and evaluating literary texts that dominated US literary studies in the past (738). When Mao and Walkowitz celebrate monographs that emphasize “modernism’s entanglement . . . with . . . feminism, socialism, nationalism, and other programs of social change” (737) or colleagues who “encounter[r] with fresh eyes and ears” artworks “by members of marginalized social groups” (738), they indicate powerful desires for social, political, and economic equality, at home and abroad, drive the disciplinary transformations NMS sanctions.

As some of the major studies Mao and Walkowitz cite make clear, many NMS scholars hope their expansive activities will serve broader left agendas of this kind not only within the discipline of literary studies, but also, outside of the university. A moment in Jahan Ramazani’s acclaimed study, A Transnational Poetics (2009), exemplifies this desire. Ramazani gives new expression to the anti-nationalist and anti-colonial dreams such modernist writers as Claude McKay, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon first voiced when he describes what motivates his book:

I write from within the early twenty-first-century US academy, when the most consequential nationalism in the world is American, when assumptions about civilizational differences sometimes underwrite political discourse and even projections of US military forces abroad. Under these circumstances . . . the usefulness of . . . pluralizing and creolizing our models of culture and citizenship, should not be underestimated. . . . A nuanced picture of cross-national and cross-civilizational fusion and friction is badly needed today, and denationalized disciplines in the humanities may help provide it, however limited their extra-institutional reach. (48–49)

Ramazani hopes his scholarship contributes to vital efforts contemporary state violence requires of those who would combat it. He wants to counter imperial logics that devalue difference across the globe and in so doing license the US state to ruthlessly pursue its own interests. Literary scholars, he argues, might serve this project for equality by expanding, diversifying, and “denationalizing” their own disciplines inside US universities. This moving call for political change represents NMS’s determination to produce from inside of literary studies the new ways of thinking and being contemporary conditions demand.

At the same time, however, Ramazani registers an anxiety that today pervades both the New Modernist Studies and literary studies in general. Ramazani is confident increasingly plural “models of culture and citizenship,” such as those he finds in the poems of the past and present, can counter the ways of thinking he believes perpetuate global inequities. And yet, he wonders whether or not he and other academics can finally contribute to this “extra-institutional” project when they revise disciplinary practices. When Ramazani emphasizes his position “within the early-twenty-first-century US academy”—he works inside a department (University of Virginia’s Department of English) and within one or more subfields (“modernist” and “postcolonial” poetry) of an already specialized area of study (literary studies)—he does so in order to at once identify his sphere of influence and to express doubts about the final significance of the activities he carries out within it. He speaks passionately for a disciplinary change his political commitments inspire, but he also worries about the restricted reach of the change he proposes.

If we take seriously this consummate anxiety—and the urgency of the social and economic inequalities critics want to redress demands we do—we might pick up where Ramazani leaves off and investigate its sources more fully. To do so, I turn now to Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea, NMS’s longest and most ambitious document of self-presentation. Latham and Rogers’s book at once introduces the series, “New Modernisms,” which the authors edit for Bloomsbury’s academic imprint, and tells a story about professional progress that culminates in the New Modernist Studies. It develops an extended version of the narrative of expansion Mao and Walkowitz first sketched and fills in the academic history necessary to understand it. I believe a critical reading of this history, which tracks alongside NMS’s celebrated expansion a tandem movement of contraction, helps explain literary studies’ broader disquiet.

What “Modernism” Was and Is

Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea is the most recent contribution to the special genre of articles and monographs academics have dedicated to defining modernism.[6] It also gives an overview of this genre. The book describes and organizes the twentieth century’s many accounts of modernism before endorsing in conclusion the New Modernist Studies’ expanded vision of it. The writers display deep and wide expertise as they move nimbly over more than a century’s worth of fraught material. They offer students and colleagues a thorough overview of the debates that have constituted the field they call “modernist studies.”

A new version of the genre’s definitional question—first posed by Harry Levin (1960) in the essay “What Was Modernism?”—guides the book. In their introduction and conclusion, Latham and Rogers ask: “What is modernism?” (1). Posing the question this way prepares them to develop a response importantly different from those previous critics generated. “Modernism” is no longer a proper noun, as it was for Levin’s generation, so readers know right away the authors will not try to describe a period’s dominant style and make big claims about Western life based upon it. By asking what modernism is, Latham and Rogers remind readers the term shares with all such constructions its perpetually unfinished character, and critics will always have to define it anew to serve present interests. They thus break with an earlier generation of critics Maurice Beebe (1974) typifies when he extends to readers mourning “the passing of the greatest literary age since the Renaissance” this small comfort: “we can now define Modernism with confidence that we shall not have to keep adjusting our definition in order to accommodate new visions and values” (1076).

In order to answer their question anew for twenty-first century readers—as Latham and Rogers do in their fourth and final chapter on the New Modernist Studies—the authors tell us first what modernism used to be. They begin with the term’s emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At first, they explain, “modernism” circulated widely, freely, and polemically among “writers, artists, and thinkers around the world,” all of whom “believed that something was happening, that the established conventions of realism, representation, and poetic form seemed to be failing in the face of new experiences, new audiences, and new things” (8). Usual suspects T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and others argued in this period over modern art’s nature and value, in part, Latham and Rogers emphasize, as a way to secure a legacy for their own experimental works.

Latham and Rogers next describe what we might understand to be the original contraction upon which their narrative of expansion depends. In chapter two, “Consolidation,” academics step in to settle artists’ charged, vital, and international quarrels. By the mid-twentieth century, the authors explain, the so-called New Critics moved modernism’s artworks out of the “bohemian garrets and ateliers” from which they had emerged and installed them in “college classrooms and student anthologies” (19). Borrowing a figure from Joyce, Latham and Rogers say this generation of critics understood modernism to be “a ‘strandentwining cable’ that weaves together a distinct group of writers and artists around shared aesthetic practices” (7). The New Critics and their kin, in other words, revered an exclusionary canon of difficult, formally sophisticated, and willfully apolitical literary works (mostly) white European and American men composed. In so doing, they “silenc[ed] the voices of artists marginalized by gender, race, sexuality, and geography” (207).

“Iron Filings,” Latham and Rogers’s third chapter (named for a figure they take from Pound), maps the slow demise of this conservative vision. The authors explain how critics writing in the 1970s and 1980s—Edward W. Said, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and others populate their account—first challenged from the left the modernist canon and its attendant sense of art’s autonomy. The chapter glosses work by “feminists,” “Marxists,” “black modernists,” and “postmodernists” (103–49). These groups, Latham and Rogers argue, began “to move modernism away from the relative autonomy of aesthetic difficulty and toward a broader engagement with political and social issues that inhere within an increasingly global modernity” (14). Scholars and critics came to examine diverse texts and develop worldly and historical views of art. Latham and Rogers laud these efforts and find in them the origins for the work the New Modernist Studies advances.[7] These earlier oppositional efforts do not satisfy them, however. This generation, they argue, still focused too often upon the virtues of difficult, formally experimental texts elites composed, failed to privilege works for “identitarian” reasons (8), or promulgated esoteric theories of language with dubious claims to legitimacy (14).

Enter the New Modernist Studies. This loosely affiliated movement, Latham and Rogers explain in their final chapter, emerged in the 1990s to overcome these failures and complete the oppositional project. NMS of course does so by expanding modernism’s materials along the spatial, temporal, and vertical axes Mao and Walkowitz name. Contemporary scholars let speak, on syllabi and in academic journals, those diverse voices literary studies once silenced. They devote increased attention to “women’s experiences of modernity” (161), promote “new awareness of the multiple ways in which homosexuality and queerness defined and constituted many of the works we now call ‘modernist’” (163), and treat race as a vital “part of a larger network of forces, practices, and identities” (168). As part of the same effort to displace elite texts, NMS makes new archives available to period specialists. It “attempt[s] to synthesize rather than to bracket or isolate forms of cultural expression across multiple media and throughout the world” (149–50). Examining a range of media forms, NMS scholars believe, unseats literature as an exclusive activity and affirms that other texts deserve critical attention. NMS scholars also continue to explore art’s many entanglements with history’s forces.

When Latham and Rogers ask themselves one last time the book’s guiding question—“what is modernism?”—they answer it in a way they believe does justice to the radical openness these expanded practices affirm. They leave readers with this “desultory, if nevertheless provocative answer: ‘We don’t know’” (206). The New Modernist Studies, they say, accepts that “there is, finally, no right way to define modernism, just as there is finally no right way to carve up the rich multiplicity of human expression” (207–8). Because the New Modernist Studies is neither a movement nor a method, but rather “the collective work of thousands of scholars,” it generates conclusions that have been and are likely to be in the future “ultimately incommensurable” (149). The book’s final Whitmanian gesture accepts these contradictions in order to applaud expansion itself as a final good. NMS dispenses with the canon, the period container, and the category of the literary as identifiable features of the object it investigates. In so doing, contemporary scholars believe they fulfill a narrative of advancement earlier critics set in motion, but could not complete. According to the New Modernist Studies, fundamental indeterminacy itself constitutes a decisive victory for the left.

This is a happy story. US academics have today completed a project decades in the making, and the left has at last triumphed inside humanities departments. And yet, as canons, periods, and materials have expanded inside US literary studies, the same narrative of inclusion and progress has not unfolded outside the university, as the 2016 US election made clear. If NMS’s practitioners hope the transformations for which they work within their field can contribute to broader political, social, and economic projects for equality, the radical divergence of these two chronologies might provoke oppositional scholars to examine anew the conviction that indeterminacy is itself a self-evident and absolute good. (This is not to suggest literary studies produced, or alone might have prevented, current emergencies. The profession’s progressive victory narrative simply sounds an eccentric note against the right’s rise.)

A figure Latham and Rogers select to represent the New Modernist Studies helps us identify one possible source for this distressing incongruity and thus points the way to alternative projects. In their final chapter, the authors describe the new core exhibition Catherine Grenier curated for Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2013. Under Grenier’s direction, they write, the Pompidou has traded its “canonical and almost exclusively Eurocentric understanding of modernism”—and the modes of display conventional to it—for a new logic of exhibition:

Crucially, the museum abandons a narrative of development and opts instead simply to display as diverse an array of materials on the walls as it can. Picassos rub shoulders with architectural models from Brazil, Japanese prints, and paintings by the Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia—all placed against wallpaper made from hundreds of little magazines. (150–51)

This exhibition style, Latham and Rogers believe, represents something essential about the current state of their field. It signals “we are in an ‘interrogatory’ moment that invites us to ask anew about the range, constitution, and value of modernism” (151). A viewer standing before this display, in other words, stands in the figural space the contemporary modernist scholar occupies.

This figure should be familiar to expert readers of modern discourses. A genealogy of artists, critics, and philosophers proliferated versions of it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Marx and Nietzsche give two of the most famous accounts[8]). When Latham and Rogers invoke it here, they remind readers contemporary US academics confront under their own peculiar circumstances the prototypical dilemma “modern” minds face. The scholar stands before his materials as Walter Benjamin’s ([1940] 1968) “angel” stands before history’s ruins or as Wallace Stevens’s ([1942] 1997b) “Man on the Dump” straddles culture’s dross. To be “modern,” figures of this kind suggest, is to be aware one is a historical being that creates a future out of a past by evaluating materials in the present. It is also to face perpetually the crushing problems proper to this condition, among them, the knowledge that whatever sense one makes of the past will itself one day end up on history’s junk heap.

The figure Benjamin invents to exemplify this dilemma, the “angel of history,” differs from the cheerful twenty-first-century modernist Latham and Rogers find in the museum, gazing raptly at the walls. The contrast is instructive. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin’s angel, a trope for the radical or oppositional historian of culture, experiences the modern subject’s constituting crisis. He looks back upon a past that fills his entire perceptual field, a past he perceives as a “pile of debris” that “grows skyward” (257). As he gazes upon history’s ruins, he experiences a deep and awful longing. He wants nothing more than to “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” (257–58). Confronted with a disorganized mass of cultural relics that overwhelms him, the radical historian must decide what to do with these materials in order to serve present needs. He wants desperately to make sense of, and in so doing redeem for the present, the violent and destructive chaos of human activity we call history.

Tragically, though, a twofold danger frustrates the oppositional historian’s efforts. He knows, first, that the objects of the past that appear before him, many of which other historians regard as evidence of progress, do not enter his field of attention untouched by powerful interests. On the contrary, the same conditions of brutal inequality he hopes to oppose produce and pass along the “cultural treasures” others believe signal advancement (256). The historian therefore regards with suspicion both privileged works and the means by which they are “transmitted from one owner to another” (256). He believes that “even the dead will not be safe” from ruling interests, so he tries to wrest from them both revered and disdained objects (255).

At the same time as the radical historian struggles to protect the dead, he also struggles to protect himself. While the angel attempts to recover out of the past resources for the present, a “storm irresistibly propels” him “into the future to which his back is turned” (258). The angel cannot easily reinterpret or redeem the ruins because, catastrophically, he is enmeshed himself within the very history he wants to grasp and transform. Just as cruel interests produce, organize, and preserve history’s materials for their own purposes, so too do present conflicts and conditions always over-determine the radical historian’s work. As Benjamin puts it, the “same threat hangs over both [the content of the tradition and its receivers]: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes” (255). (This is in part why Benjamin imagines only a messianic figure, who stops time, can complete the revolutionary historian’s effort.[9])

As Latham and Rogers’s version of this figure indicates, the contemporary scholar of modernism faces with satisfaction the conditions the angel meets with horror and yearning. This is in part because, by its own account, the New Modernist Studies believes it has fulfilled Benjamin’s charge to protect the dead from ruling interests. While Latham and Rogers are critical of Theodor Adorno and those friends of Benjamin’s who “effectively helped build the modernist canon and affirmed its terms,” they are grateful to Benjamin because he “offered a set of tools and perspectives for undoing that work” (106–7). The New Modernist Studies believes it has secured, in the figurative space of the institution the museum signifies, what Benjamin’s angel desperately wanted—time and venue to stay and awaken the dead, to recover and let sound out of the past’s ruinous violence excluded songs.

If the New Modernist Studies protects the dead from ruling interests, however, it does not protect itself. NMS does not recognize, as Benjamin insists oppositional critics and scholars must, that it faces the same danger as do its objects. As the New Modernist Studies fulfills Latham and Rogers’s disciplinary progress narrative of expansion, it also completes the book’s corresponding narrative of contraction. The story about modernism’s enlargement, Latham and Rogers explicitly say, is also a story about its total “institutionalization and professionalization” (134). While some artists and critics in the early twentieth century “conceptualized [modernism] as a site of resistance to modernity’s regulatory and routinizing practices,” Latham and Rogers write, modernism has by 2015 “become part of an institutional system” (15). Today, modernism is, among other things, “an institutionalized profession, self-regulating and fitted somewhat uncomfortably between the nineteenth century and the always-moving present” (207). NMS finds “its strongest support and articulations in the institutions of academia: conferences, journals, scholarly organizations, and course catalogs” (156). The profession, in other words, with its self-directed procedures for formal training, publication, and credentialing, furnishes the domain within which NMS’s progress narrative can register as meaningful.

Attention to the contraction upon which expansion depends reveals a profound contradiction legitimates the New Modernist Studies. As scholars have worked to extend modernism’s materials and to abandon dated claims about art’s independence from political and economic forces, they have at the same time embraced the apparent autonomy the profession seems to tender those (increasingly few) humanities academics universities employ. (Latham and Rogers [2015] note the number of tenure-track positions for specialists in modernism US universities advertise has declined in recent years [157]). The profession creates a seemingly sovereign space in which a fortunate few can freely play over an extended set of materials.

Inside this apparently secure and exclusive domain, the fundamental indeterminacy Latham and Rogers hail as itself an achievement for the left performs another function entirely. Undirected expansion turns out to be a condition for the possibility of professional activity in the present. “Modernist studies,” Latham and Rogers explain, “has been strengthened by the lack of resolution over what exactly modernism is. A perpetual ‘definitional crisis’ has been a boon, in other words, to the wide-ranging debates about the field’s nature, boundaries, and contents” (151). This permanent emergency enables academics to produce scholarship an audience of like-minded period specialists will value. The authors celebrate the remarkable volume of discourse academics continue to publish out of the field’s authorizing crisis: “Even in the troubled world of academic publishing, studies of modernism, anthologies of modernist texts, introductions to the movement, essay collections on modernism and its formation, and other such texts have flourished since the mid-1990s, far outpacing the analogous publications in the 1960s and 1970s that helped entrench the field in universities” (156). The New Modernist Studies finally presents itself as an interminable (and profitable) set of classificatory squabbles elites with common aims perpetuate, but need not resolve, inside protected institutions.

This insular vision of US intellectual activity is not exactly new, and its consequences are not newly dangerous. In the well-known essay “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” Edward W. Said (1983) warned literary critics that the so-called “culture wars” of the 1970s and 1980s might not produce the outcomes across culture and society rival factions on the right and left desired.[10] Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings, Said (1983) argued universities, as institutions located within “civil society,” cannot furnish a protected vantage point from which critics on the left might attack state and market interests (175). The concept of “culture,” as Raymond Williams (1983) has demonstrated, emerged in tandem with and as an instrument of the nation-state. Therefore, Said argues, a critic “acting entirely” within the traditionally restricted humanist “domain” of the “literary specialist” does not destroy, but rather “confirms the culture and the society enforcing those restrictions” (175). This “confirmation,” Said writes, “acts to strengthen the civil and political societies whose fabric is culture itself” (175). When academics conceive of literary criticism as an adversarial activity one can pursue within an autonomous professional space, then, culture’s indissoluble relationship to power ensures that activity paradoxically reinforces “the whole enterprise of the State” (175). The autonomous view of literary studies NMS propagates is an updated version of the one Said challenges.[11]

Benjamin’s fable suggests oppositional scholars and critics who want to promote contemporary change should not be satisfied with this limited view of intellectual activity. To renew a vision of modernism responsive to contemporary inequality, scholars would have to expand more than their visions of the past. They would also have to expand their views of the present.[12] An expansion of this kind would multiply modernist studies’ materials along two new horizons. In addition to past artworks, modernist studies would explicitly consider, first, how ruling interests produce inequality in the present, and second, how its own relationship to those interests influences its activity. A disciplinary program such as NMS would have to begin with and attend to the logics, structures, and institutions that contribute to ongoing inequality, violence, and injustice, not only inside the discipline, but also more broadly, and then ask how its specialized activities might best transform these. Because liberating voices inside elite spaces has not countered inequalities the consequences of which those excluded from those spaces feel most acutely, literary studies might now begin with its expanded materials and ask anew what, more specifically, scholars might do with them.

If these expanded practices guided the field’s historical work, modernist studies might be better positioned to pose and respond to its constituting question—what is modernism? Right now, the field’s leading experts do not believe they need to resolve among themselves answers to it. Perhaps this is because the question is not today an urgent one for radical or progressive movements, or worse, perhaps ruling interests have already seized the question in its moment of danger. We might ask then, not what modernism is or was, but instead what modernism would have to be for it to matter again what it is. How might we look anew at modernism in a way that will best serve our oppositional desires in the present so that we might shape the more equitable futures we want? What vision of modernism can help us best respond to our world? What will modernism be?

What “Modernism” Might Be

Because Benjamin encourages us to take a more expansive view of the conditions that produce contemporary inequality both within and outside of the university when we pose enormous questions of this kind, I want to develop one tentative response by adopting the approach he recommends. After the financial collapse of 2008, many critics of arts and culture writing from the left have come to use the word “neoliberalism” to describe the forces that produce inequality today in the US and beyond.[13] The term has its strengths and limitations. It is simultaneously capacious and specific, so it can name both contemporary economic and political conditions and the popular ways of thinking that fabricate them. At the same time, it often circulates too capaciously. Philosopher of economics Philip Mirowski (2013) reproaches left intellectuals, for instance, who “bandy about attributions of ‘neoliberalism’ as a portmanteau term of abuse when discussing grand phenomena often lumped together under the terminology of ‘globalization’ and ‘financialization’ and ‘governmentality’” (29). In an attempt to avoid this practice, I want to define this abstraction more precisely before I consider how it might help us reevaluate NMS’s progress narrative and develop a revised sense of what modernism might need to be. To do so, I rely upon the more particular sense of the word Mirowski (2013) offers in his recent account of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Because Mirowski places at the center of his definition a view of epistemology he argues helps produce contemporary inequality, his account is of special interest to those who hope academic activities might counter ruling forces.

For Mirowski (2013), neoliberalism is both a “program” right-wing intellectuals and elites operating across a network of public and private institutions developed over the course of the twentieth century (29) and a “worldview [that] has sunk its roots deep into everyday life, almost to the point of passing as the ‘ideology of no ideology’” (28). His bracingly critical and deeply historical book-length account of this program and worldview includes the familiar tenets we most often associate with the term. Neoliberalism, Mirowski explains, insists “market society must be treated as a ‘natural’ and inexorable state of mankind” (55); it “redefine[s] the shape and functions of the state” to better serve market interests (56); it regards “inequality of economic resources and political rights not as an unfortunate by-product of capitalism, but as a necessary functional characteristic of [an] ideal market system” (63); it maintains “corporations can do no wrong” (64); and so on. This program produces inequalities that cut across economic and identity categories. It sanctions the strong domestic police state activists hold responsible for the mass incarceration and frequent extra-judicial killings of African-American men, for instance (Mirowski 65–66).[14]

Mirowski argues the specific “epistemological commitments” that ensured this program’s ascendency continue to guarantee its future, even in the wake of the devastating global crisis that should have delegitimized it (333). In service of the view that markets best organize human life, Mirowski argues, elites “deploy ignorance as a political tool” (12). He offers this interpretation of the role ignorance plays in economist and neoliberal pioneer Friedrich Hayek’s worldview:

For Hayek, the conscious attempt to conceive of the nature of public interest is the ultimate hubris, and to concoct strategies to achieve it is to fall into Original Sin. True organic solidarity can obtain only when everyone believes (correctly or not) they are just following their own selfish idiosyncratic ends, or perhaps don’t have any clear idea whatsoever of what they are doing, when in fact they are busily (re)producing beneficent evolutionary regularities beyond their ken and imagination. Thus, ignorance promotes social order, or as he said, “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.” (81) 

Because Hayek and those who share his views believe markets establish a transcendentally sanctioned order human reason, imagination, and will can only complicate and destroy, Mirowski argues they “strive to preserve and promote doubt and ignorance,” as many economists unwittingly did after 2008 (81). Motivated by this view of knowledge’s nature and value, recent policies have started to eliminate or weaken such knowledge producing institutions as the university by “put[ting] them on commercial footing” (82).[15] Doing so undercuts the critical, theoretical, and imaginative activities in which the humanities (and, just as vitally, the sciences[16]) conventionally offer training. These activities now seem, from this popular perspective, deleterious to omnipotent economic systems, and therefore, to human life. Policies of this kind deny “that it is even possible to speak truth to power, or that one can rationally plan social goals and their attainment” (Mirowski 82).

At the same time, and paradoxically, Mirowski argues elites themselves have relied over the course of the twentieth century upon precisely those modes of knowledge production, theoretical planning, critical rigor, and imagination they denounce in order to construct market-friendly policies and to build cultures of consent around their notions of freedom, human life, and education. Friedman, Hayek, George Stigler, and others associated with the influential and international Mont Pèlerin Society cultivated robust, diffuse, and persistent networks for pursuing creative and epistemological activity inside think tanks, universities, corporations, and state institutions (37-38). As a tactic for consolidating power, neoliberal policies strategically deny opponents access to those resources they utilize to gain and safeguard influence (83).

This epistemological paradigm, experts in modernism will recognize, imperils Benjamin’s figure. The very historical self-awareness writers and artists working in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries associated with being “modern,” in other words, today threatens to disappear. The idea that we might understand and evaluate present political and economic conditions and invent together ways to transform them is under pressure. While US and European elites continue to deploy such terms as “modernization” and “modernity” in what Fredric Jameson (2002) calls “a fundamental political discursive struggle” to guarantee free-market capitalism seems reality’s natural telos (9), they also tactically foreclose certain so-called “modern” ways of thinking others might use to resist current realities. As Mirowski argues, contemporary discourses in part shore up power by denying above all that human activity—be it political, imaginative, or intelligent—can help shape better futures.

A range of practices inside knowledge-producing institutions such as the university contribute to this popular view. US economics, for instance, leaves historical circumstances out of its models, as Thomas Piketty (2014) argues (573–74), or psychology joins with evolutionary biology to prove timeless drives motivate men to purchase luxury vehicles (Sundie et al. 2010).[17] Scholars of culture might counter these tactics from within literary studies if we imagine we are in conversation, not only with our colleagues and our field’s bygone giants, but also with other producers of knowledge across epistemological institutions.[18] Work of this kind would complement interdisciplinary research contemporary scholars already pursue—Latham and Rogers emphasize an “interdisciplinary foundation” grounds the New Modernist Studies (168)—but it would also differ importantly from it. In addition to adopting approaches other fields generate, as many interdisciplinary projects now do, literary studies might challenge the epistemological assumptions that license inequality and violence across fields and identify instead the alternate views of those creative, imaginative, and intelligent human activities neoliberalism attempts to monopolize and conceal that humanities traditions hold out to us.

Some such views, of course, contribute to transcendental worldviews new versions of which continue to foster inequality. Scholars therefore would not be able to return to the romantic or classically humanist ways of thinking about art theorists of the posthuman warn us are dangerously outmoded.[19] Rather, critics might recover and defend, before they disappear, literary visions of the tandem powers and limits of human activity historically conceived, in Benjamin’s sense. Professional readers of modernist texts are uniquely suited to contribute to projects of this kind because late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers and artists conceived in increasingly secular, material, and historical ways precisely those creative and imaginative capabilities popular discourses currently deny.[20]

I turn in conclusion to one such conception. Over the course of a long career, Wallace Stevens developed in verse and prose a potent vision of the capabilities and limitations of human imagination. I want to conclude with Stevens because the demise of the canon NMS achieves—a necessary and vital destruction—enables us to look anew not only at previously excluded materials. It also invites us to see in new ways those now liberated from their advantaged places within a hierarchy Raymond Williams (1987) worried had captured imagination’s radical potential. Because many of us share the sense that lesser known works recently recovered (or, as in the case of the heretofore unknown Claude McKay novel a graduate student at Columbia University found in the archives, discovered[21]) deserve more robust attention, I want to demonstrate how the alternative mode of expansion I am proposing can also help us see previously favored figures in newly apposite ways. (As a tradition of African American writing that moves from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison and Claudia Rankine emphasizes, violent hierarchies also disfigure, though differently, those who claim a place at the top.[22]) The field’s pervasive view of Stevens has long been over-determined by such popular misreadings of his poems and essays as those Harold Bloom published in the 1970s.[23] Bloom misrepresents Stevens by insisting he adheres to the willfully ahistorical, autonomous, and unworldly understanding of art Bloom is one of the last US critics to prefer.

Stevens offers one version of his vision of imagination in a poem he composed on the eve of the Second World War, “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.” The poem gives an early sense of what later works—most famously, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”—elaborate more fully, but it has the virtue, for my purposes, of lovingly antagonizing the same institutional audience I have just suggested literary studies might imagine for itself. “Extracts” assembles scraps taken from lectures and notes a speaker addresses to an audience with a stake in epistemological questions.

The poem’s wry title, as usual, opens onto a subject that turns out to be deadly serious. In the first section, Stevens’s speaker establishes before an academic audience of bearded “Messieurs” a dichotomy readers of Stevens will recognize is fundamental to his project. The speaker contrasts a “wrinkled ros[e]” made of “paper” (227) with “the blood-rose living in its smell” (228). He entreats his audience to consider the relationship between the two categories of being for which these flowers stand, categories which go elsewhere in Stevens’s oeuvre by the familiar names “imagination” and “reality.” At first, the speaker seems melancholy as he remarks the differences between the blooms. The paper rose is “false” and it is “dust,” even if it makes for us “brilliant” sounds (228). The blood-rose might be “silent,” but it is vibrant, pungent, and alive in the “sun and rain” (228).

Immediately, though, we realize Stevens does not establish this difference in order to privilege plant over paper, or reality over imagination, and his elegy gives way to affirmation. Ours, he tells the academy, “is an artificial world,” and the “rose of / Paper is of the nature of its world” (228). What we might call reality—the “sea,” the “mountains,” and the “sky”—is “so many written words” (228). We cannot, then, experience a world of necessity unmediated by or independent of the language we use to describe and know it, because this language shapes our perceptions of what we encounter. We must therefore accept that “the false and the true are one” (228).

For Stevens, who here differs from such contemporaries as Eliot (a villain in the poem), understanding the interdependence of these two categories need not engender melancholy. The very notion that we can know the blood-rose, or the real, without exercising our human faculties seems to Stevens a dangerous fantasy, one he sees emerge out of transcendental traditions. (This essay’s epigraph formulates most simply this insight.) “The rainy rose belongs / To naked men, to women naked as rain,” and we have never truly been these men and women (228). “Where,” the speaker asks, “is that summer warm enough to walk / . . . Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part / Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what / Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?” (228). This rhetorical question suggests humans never could access the paradise of ignorance Christian traditions project into the species’ distant past. This is not because we sinners once traded for knowledge’s paltry spoils the immortality ignorance guaranteed. It is rather because the difficult environments we inhabit on earth—cold, poisonous, dirty—require finite, self-aware beings to know them, and change them, and change ourselves to suit them. In order to do so, the speaker makes clear, we have relied upon what the paper rose represents: intelligence and imagination.

Stevens’s speaker thus asks the academy to renounce any fiction that requires its acolytes cleave epistemological and creative human activity from “reality” and its imagined fulfillments. He entreats his interlocutors to repudiate promises that ignorance can produce a paradise of the real. As the sections that follow demonstrate, Stevens has in mind Plato’s idealism, monarchy’s divine right, and the old world’s monotheisms, systems that make the same seductive promises contemporary “free-market fundamentalism” does (Krugman 2010). Stevens at once challenges these monumental metaphysical systems and suggests we attempt to better understand the character and purpose of the human faculties by which we invented them, faculties without which we can neither know, nor make, reality.

The final section of “Extracts” models such an attempt. Here is the speaker’s closing plea to the institution of fine ideas:

If earth dissolves

            Its evil after death, it dissolves it while

            We live. Thence come the final chants, the chants

            Of the brooder seeking the acutest end

            Of speech: to pierce the heart’s residuum

            And there to find music for a single line,

            Equal to memory, one line in which

            The vital music formulates the words.

Behold the men in helmets borne on steel,

Discolored, how they are going to defeat. (233-34)

Stevens concludes the poem with a careful vision of the tandem possibilities and limitations of human creative power. Earth, here a figure for the conditions of necessity the constraints of time and space produce, “dissolves evil” when death erases, and does not oblige an everlasting soul to harbor forever, life’s accumulated injuries. If we accept our own finitude in this way—“Be tranquil in your wounds,” Stevens (after Whitman) bids us (229)—we can turn our attention to the earthly powers we do possess, powers that help us “dissolve evil . . . while we live.” These are our “final chants,” the songs, stories, and ideas we make out of the conditions of mortality we cannot transcend. We compose and perfect these chants, not only because we are intelligent, brooding over what words will satisfy the mind, but also because we are sensuous. Sounds please us. When we hear “the vital music,” we know we have found the material for beliefs that “pierce,” and thereby shape, us (234).

Yet, even as the poem rises in the end to this fever pitch of human celebration, its final chant leaves us with the brutal image of soldiers “going to defeat.” This concluding volta serves a composite function. It warns us, as Stevens (1997) will again in the coda to Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, that the songs of belief and knowledge we invent can stir us to violence. (“How gladly with proper words the soldier dies, / If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech,” the Notes concludes [352]). In so doing, Stevens undercuts the good/evil dichotomy he has developed and emphasizes we can use our saving faculties to produce the same pain they can alleviate. The final couplet also leaves us with an image of precisely that from which the poem suggests we cannot turn away. Our chants comfort us while we live, but we must keep before us our own mortality in order to truly understand what we are and can do. This tempered conclusion at once affirms human creative power and admits, with humility, our profound and irreducible limitations. Stevens neither elevates to divine status intelligence and imagination, as some romantics did, nor denies these faculties influence our lives on earth, as do some contemporary discourses.

This vision cautions us to remain wary of explanations that promise an unknowable set of forces that operate beyond our control can best organize our lives and insists instead that humans are historical beings. Within limits, in other words, we shape out of the past, by way of our creative and critical activities, both the selves we are and the worlds we know. By affirming this vision (which Stevens is only one among many modernists, canonical and marginal, to leave us), and by sharpening it against those views that oppose it, we can seize at the moment it threatens to disappear a historical sense of ourselves. When we privilege this historical view of the human, we need not nostalgically return to and affirm the destructive and arrogant humanism that long licensed the West’s colonial violence and initiated environmental devastation. Rather, views such as Stevens’s can help us pursue in revitalized ways the increasingly material and historical search for self-understanding modernist genealogies value. Because a posthuman view of the species would still have to be able to explain the species’ historical activities, writers who describe these seem as important as ever.

As Benjamin’s vision of the angel warns, oppositional criticism cannot be programmatic, so reading Stevens this way offers no final, reproducible answer to this essay’s title question. It is merely one attempt to mobilize in the face of the conditions that produce inequality today the resources of the past. Because the New Modernist Studies is satisfied simply to expand its store of past materials, it does not encourage scholars to open out of modernism’s discourses specific and identifiable ways of thinking the left might rely upon when it tries to oppose from within the university the forces that produce social and economic disparity. Indeterminacy ensures NMS can continue as an influential, autonomous, and relatively lucrative institutional force, in part because it does not encourage critics to oppose power. Its foundational indeterminacy (“we don’t know”) seems to complement and mirror, rather than to contest, the broader attitude toward epistemological and creative human activity upon which ruling interests strategically insist. When elite discourses attempt to control and conceal the critical and creative practices humanities disciplines previously cultivated, academic trends that do not value these practices can come to suit elite interests.

To ameliorate these shortcomings, contemporary scholars need not necessarily flee the university or contritely devote themselves to public outreach projects. All institutional work is not identical. Mirowski’s epistemological reading of contemporary inequality suggests one of the most oppositional acts a scholar or critic can today perform is to insist—from inside and across the creative, critical, and knowledge-producing fields currently under attack—that historical activity is ongoing and vital.

References

Altieri, Charles. 2012. “How the ‘New Modernist Studies’ Fails the Old Modernism.” Textual Practice 26, no. 4: 763–82.

Anderson, Chris. 2008 “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired. June 23. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.

Beebe, Maurice. 1974. “What Modernism Was.” Journal of Modern Literature 3, no. 5: 1065–84.

Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books.

Bloom, Harold. 1976. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bové, Paul A. 2010. “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory.” Field Day Review 6: 71–93.

Brzezinski, Max. 2011. “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?” Minnesota Review 76: 109–25.

Capehart, Jonathan. 2015. “From Trayvon Martin to ‘Black Lives Matter.’” Washington Post. February 27. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/02/27/from-trayvon-martin-to-black-lives-matter/.

Churchill, Suzanne W. 2006. The Little Magazine “Others” and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1817) 1985. Biographia Literaria. Vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2001. “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism.” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3: 493–513.

———. 2015. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Howarth, Peter. 2012. “Autonomous and Heteronomous in Modernist Form: From Romantic Image to the New Modernist Studies.” Critical Quarterly 54, no. 1: 71– 80.

Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present. New York: Verso.

Jauss, Hans Robert. (1970) 2005. “Modernity and Literary Tradition.” Translated by Christian Thorne. Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2: 329–64.

Josipovici, Gabriel. 2010. Whatever Happened to Modernism? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kermode, Frank. 1986. “Modernisms.” London Review of Books 8, no. 9: 3–6.

Krugman, Paul. 2010. “When Zombies Win.” “The Opinion Pages.” The New York Times. December 19. www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20krugman.html.

Latham, Sean and Gayle Rogers. 2015. Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea. New York: Bloomsbury.

Lee, Felicia R. 2012. “New Novel of Harlem Renaissance is Found.” New York Times. September 14. www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/books/harlem-renaissance-novel-by-claude-mckay-is-discovered.html.

Levin, Harry. 1960. “What Was Modernism?” The Massachusetts Review 1, no. 4: 609–30.

Lichtblau, Eric. (2016). “US Hate Crimes Surge 6%, Fueled by Attacks on Muslims.” New York Times. November 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/ politics/fbi-hate-crimes-muslims.html.

Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. 2006. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press.

———. 2008. “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3: 737–48.

Marx, Karl. (1852) 1963. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers.

Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism  Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.

Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Vintage.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1876) 1997. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 57–124. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Ramazani, Jahan. 2009. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Readings, Bill. 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Robbins, Bruce. 1985. “Modernism and Professionalism: The Case of William Carlos Williams.” In On Poetry and Poetics, edited by Richard Waswo, 191–205. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Said, Edward W. 1983. “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, 158–177. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.

———. 2000. “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism.” PMLA 115, no. 3: 285–91.

———. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stevens, Wallace. (1942) 1997a. “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.” Parts of a World, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 227–234.

———. (1942) 1997b. “The Man on the Dump.” Parts of a World, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 184–85.

———. (1951) 1997. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” The Necessary Angel, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 643–65.

———. (1955) 1997. “The Plain Sense of Things.” The Rock, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.

———. 1997. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America.

Sundie, Jill. M., Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Daniel J. Beal. (2010). “Peacocks, Porsches, and Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. November 1.

Toomer, Jean. (1923) 2011. Cane. Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton.

United States Department of Labor. 2016. “Equal Pay.” December 12. https://www.dol.gov/featured/equalpay.

V21 Collective. 2016. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective: Ten Theses.” December 12. http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/.

Wellek, René. 1985. “Literary Modern?” Review of Genealogy of Modernism, by Michael Levenson. The New Criterion 3, no. 9: 76.

Wicke, Jennifer. 2001. “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble.” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3: 389–403.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. (1986) 1989. “The Uses of Cultural Theory.” The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, 163–176.

———. (1987) 1989. “When Was Modernism?” in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, 31–35.

———. 1989. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. New York:Verso.

Whitman, Walt. (1855) 1996. Leaves of Grass. In Whitman: Poetry and Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, 1–146. New York: Library of America.

Williams, William Carlos. (1923) 1970. Spring and All. Imaginations. New York: New Directions. 85–151.

Epigraph taken from Wallace Stevens ([1955] 1997).

Notes 

[1] For a range of representative instances, see Robbins (1985), “Modernism and Professionalism: the Case of William Carlos Williams”; Williams ([1987] 1989), “When Was Modernism?”; Stanford Friedman (2001), “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism”; Jameson (2002), A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present; and Josipovici (2010), Whatever Happened to Modernism?

[2] A number of critics have challenged the New Modernist Studies and its assumptions from various perspectives. See Wicke (2001), “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble”; Jameson (2002); Brzezinski (2011), “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?”; Altieri (2012), “How the ‘New Modernist Studies’ Fails the Old Modernism”; Howarth (2012), “Autonomous and Heteronomous in Modernist Form: From Romantic Image to the New Modernist Studies.”

[3] In the US, for instance, inequality is today pervasive across categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Piketty (2014) compares rates of income disparity in the US in the early 2010s to those “in France and Britain during the Ancien Regime” (263). A 2010–11 survey indicates “the top decile own 72 percent of America’s wealth” (257). Capehart (2015) tracks recent instances of race violence in the US and the emergence of activist counter-movements. The United States Bureau of Labor (2016) reports US “women working full time only make about 79% of what men earn,” indicating one ongoing gender disparity liberal feminist movements often target.

[4] Friedman’s (2015) book, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time, pursues this “expansive” tendency to the limits of its logic. Friedman argues “modernism” might describe all “aesthetic movements or specific instances that innovatively engage with the specific modernities of their space/time/culture, particularly . . . those whose forms as well as content push against or reinvent inherited conventions” (190). She suggests critics might consider modernist such figures as the sixth-century Chinese poet Du Fu, whose formal innovations responded to changing political and economic conditions under the Tang Dynasty.

[5] See Churchill (2006) and Mao and Walkowitz, eds. (2006).

[6] For key works in this definitional genre, see Levin (1960), “What Was Modernism?”; Maurice Beebe (1974), “What Modernism Was”; Williams ([1987] 1989), “When Was Modernism?”; Friedman (2001), “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism”; Josipovici (2010), What Ever Happened to Modernism?

[7] When Latham and Rogers (2015) rely upon a language of “networks” as a way to explain art’s place in the “world,” for instance, they indicate Edward W. Said is one important influence for NMS (149). Said (1983) encouraged critics with radical ambitions to scrutinize any “art-for-art’s-sake theory” that insists “the world of culture and aesthetic production subsists on its own, away from the encroachments of the State and authority” and to study instead the “network” of “affiliation” that “enables a text to maintain itself as a text” (169, 174).

[8] Marx ([1852] 2004) describes historical consciousness and its challenges this way: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (15). A few years later, Nietzsche ([1876] 1997) writes: A “human being … cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this chain runs with him” (61). See Jauss ([1970] 2005) for a critical etymology of the term “modern.” Jauss traces the different modes of historical consciousness it has named over the course of Western history.

[9] See Paul A. Bové (2010), “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory,” for a challenge to the utopian, messianic element fundamental to Benjamin’s vision of history.

[10] Said (1983) characterizes his moment—acerbically—this way: “Indeed, what distinguishes the present situation is, on the one hand, a greater isolation than ever before in recent American cultural history of the literary critics from the major intellectual, political, moral, and ethical issues of the day and, on the other hand, a rhetoric, a pose, a posture (let us at last be candid) claiming not so much to represent as to be the afflictions entailed by true adversarial politics. A visitor from another world would surely be perplexed were he to overhear a so-called old critic calling the new critics dangerous. What, this visitor would ask, are they dangers to? The state? The mind? Authority?” (160).

[11] Said’s later work responds explicitly to these transformations. See, for instance, Said (1993; 2000; 2004).

[12] US academics specializing in Victorian literature and culture have recently called for “presentist” approaches. See V21 Collective (2016).

[13] Critics regularly rely upon the vision of neoliberalism anthropologist David Harvey (2005) develops in his rigorous and accessible A Brief History of Neoliberalism. The term has a long history, as Harvey demonstrates, but its popularity as an explanatory cipher for current political and economic conditions among intellectuals and activists who are not specialists in economics increased after 2008.

[14] For a timeline of recent events, see Capehart (2015).

[15] For an early account of the transformations corporate interests have inaugurated within the university, see Readings (1997).

[16] The same ways of thinking are transforming disciplinary paradigms in the social and natural sciences. See Anderson (2008).

[17] Sundie et al. (2010) claim to prove “conspicuous consumption is driven by men who are following a lower investment (vs. higher investment) mating strategy and is triggered specifically by short-term (vs. long-term) mating motives” (1).

[18] During the “culture wars,” conservative humanists opposed critics on the left who wanted to expand the canon and privilege politics. Although this conservative position has virtually disappeared within humanities departments, contemporary scholars continue to claim as their primary antagonists the New Critics and the deconstructionists, figures from literary studies’ past. It remains vital to reflect upon professional practices so that our methods serve the projects we value—and again, historical self-consciousness teaches us this labor will be perpetual—but literary critics might better accomplish this if we cultivate simultaneously a more critical view of our discipline within a system of other disciplines, many of which endorse and promulgate views of the human and of history radically different from those many experts in culture often sanction.

[19] A number of complementary and overlapping discourses put pressure on the category of the “human” as a means of pursuing a radical or progressive politics for democracy, liberty, and equality. These include the “posthumanist” projects we associate with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and their inheritors, which attempt to destroy transcendental and ontotheological humanisms, and “posthuman” projects we associate with critics such as Donna Harraway, N. Katharine Hayles, and Ursula K. Heise, which assume humans have entered a new stage of being defined by technological innovation, biological change, and environmental catastrophe. These very different discursive formations both attempt to conceive the human anew in increasingly material terms and to trade anthropocentric models of the universe for more complex ones.

[20] Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ([1817] 1985) Biographia Literaria is an originary text for an Anglophone genealogy of poetry and poetics preoccupied with the nature and function of human imagination and intelligence. For a few key texts that pursue these questions in the US, see Walt Whitman’s ([1855] 1996) Leaves of Grass; Jean Toomer’s ([1923] 2011) Cane; and William Carlos Williams’s ([1923] 1970) Spring and All.

[21] See Lee (2012).

[22] Toni Morrison (1987) renders this violence in the novel, Beloved (234). Stevens also uses racist language in some of his letters and poems. See Hayes (2014) for a nuanced engagement with Stevens’s failures.

[23] Bloom (1976) presents Stevens as an American transcendentalist in Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens.

by Robert T. Tally Jr. 

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial board. 

I

The 1950 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina was fiercely contested, featuring what even then was understood by many to be the opposed ideological trajectories of Southern politics: that of a seemingly progressive, “New South,” characterized by its support for modernization, industry, and above all civil rights (or, at least, improvements to a system of racial inequality) on the on hand, and that of a profoundly conservative tradition resistant to such change, particularly with respect to civil rights, on the other. The unelected incumbent, appointed by the governor after the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton a year earlier, Frank Porter Graham was notoriously progressive, the former president of the University of North Carolina and a proponent of desegregation. The challenger was Willis Smith, mentor to later longtime conservative senator Jesse Helms, who was himself an active campaigner for Smith in this race. At the time, this election was viewed as a turning point in North Carolinian, and perhaps even Southern, politics, so starkly was the ideological division drawn. The primary election—this being 1950, the Democratic primary was, in effect, the election, since no Republican nominee could possibly offer meaningful competition in November—was remarkably vitriolic, as Smith supporters played on the fears of bigots at every turn. (For example, one widely disseminated pro-Smith flyer announced “Frank Graham Favors Mingling of the Races.”) On May 26, a Graham supporter, the idealistic young major of Fayetteville took to the airwaves to castigate the Smith campaign for its repulsive rhetoric and divisive tactics:

Where the campaign should have been based on principles, they have attempted to assault personalities. Where the people needed light, they have brought a great darkness. Where they should have debated, they have debased. … Where reason was needed, they have goaded emotion. Where they should have invoked inspiration, they have whistled for the hounds of hate.

Decades before “dog-whistle politics” become a de facto political strategy throughout the South (and elsewhere, of course), J. O. Tally Jr. lamented the motives, and no doubt the effectiveness, of such an approach, which had made this the “most bitter, most unethical in North Carolina’s modern history.”[1]

That was my grandfather, then an ambitious, 29-year-old lawyer and politician, who must have seen himself as fairly representative of a New South intellectual and statesman. A graduate of Duke University with a law degree from Harvard, Joe Tally had returned from distinguished overseas service in the navy during World War II to teach law at Wake Forest University and to practice at the family firm before running for office in his hometown. His own career in electoral politics ended with a failed 1952 run for Congress, during which his moderate views on segregation likely amounted to an unpardonable sin for many voters in southeastern North Carolina, and he settled for alternative forms of civic and professional service, such as the Kiwanis Club, of which he later became international president. Others of Tally’s political circle had better fortunes with the voters. Terry Sanford, for example, went on to become the governor of North Carolina, then long-time president of Duke University, before returning the U.S. Senate in 1987 as perhaps the most liberal of the Southern senators. (Ah, to recall the time when an Al Gore was considered quite conservative!) Tally’s ex-wife, my grandmother Lura S. Tally, went on to serve five terms in the N.C. House and six in the Senate from 1973 to 1994, where she represented that liberal wing of the old Democratic Party, promoting legislation especially in support of elementary education, the environment, and the state’s Museum of Natural History. However, during the same period, former Smith acolyte Jesse Helms carried that banner into the U.S Senate in 1973, immediately becoming one of the most conservative members of Congress, hawkish in foreign policy, parsimonious in his domestic policy, and ever ready to protect the public from unsavory art in his attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts. Perhaps it is part of the legacy of the 1950 Senate campaign, but North Carolina had always seemed rather bi-polar in its politics, often maintaining a far-right-wing and a relatively liberal contingent in the U.S. Congress. That is, until recently. In the past decade, North Carolina, like all of the South and much of the country, has lurched ever rightward in politics and policies. Today, the spirit of the old conservatives of Willis Smith’s era reigns triumphant.

The same year that the Smith campaign allegedly “whistled for the hounds of hate” in order to secure an election over a liberal vanguard dead set on undermining traditional Southern values, another native North Carolinian lamented that those espousing belief in the such values had been forced out of the South. Speaking of the paradoxical fact that so many Southern Agrarians (including himself) had fled from their ancestral homeland to the urban North, there colonizing institutions like the University of Chicago, Richard M. Weaver proclaimed them “Agrarians in exile,” who had been rendered “homeless,” for “[t]he South no longer had a place for them, and flight to the North but completed an alienation long in progress.” Weaver explained that “the South has not shown much real capacity to fight modernism,” and added that “a large part of it is eager to succumb.”[2] For Weaver, the great Agrarians of the I’ll Take My Stand generation had been compelled to retreat in the face of those, like my grandparents, who in their “disloyalty” to “their section” of the United States exhibited “the disintegrative effects of modern liberalism.”[3] Contrary to appearances, Weaver found that the Southern values which undergirded his preferred form of cultural and political conservatism were under assault, and perhaps even waning, in the South. The baleful liberalism he saw as all but indomitable in the industrial North and Midwest was, in Weaver’s view, ineluctably encroaching on the sacred soil of the former Confederacy.

It is strange to look upon this scene from the vantage of the present. With the defeat of Senator Mary Landrieu in Louisiana’s December 6, 2014, run-off, there were no longer any Democrats from the Deep South in the U.S. Senate. And, as the 114^th Congress convened in 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives contained no white Democrats from the Deep South, this for the first time in American history. Of course, the once “solid South” has been steadily trending ever more toward the Republicans since Brown vs. Board of Education, Governor Wallace’s “segregation forever,” and Richard Nixon’s notorious Southern strategy of the late 1960s. Native conservatism, gerrymandering, demographics, racial attitudes, and other factors have come into play, and the shift is therefore not wholly surprising, but the domination of the states of the former Confederacy by the Republican Party represents a sea-change in U.S. electoral politics. Furthermore, the hegemony of a certain Southern-styled conservatism within the Republican Party and, increasingly, within social, political, and cultural conservatism more generally marks a decisive movement away from not only the mid-century liberalism against which many Agrarians like Weaver railed, but also against the worldly neoconservatives like the elder President Bush whose  embrace of a “new world order” elicited such fear and loathing from members of his own party in the early 1990s. The dominant strain of twenty-first-century political discourse in the United States is thus a variation on a sort of neo-Confederate, anti-modernist theme of the Agrarians,[4] or, rather, of Weaver, perhaps their greatest philosophical champion.

In this essay, I want to revisit the ideas of this mid-twentieth-century conservative theorist in an attempt to shed light on the origins of this distinctively American brand of conservatism in the twenty-first century. Weaver’s agrarian conservatism today seems both quaint or old-fashioned and yet disturbingly timely, as the rhetorical and intellectual force of his ideas seems all-too-real in the present social and political situation in the United States. Weaver’s mythic vision of the South, ironically, has come to symbolize the nation as a whole, at least from the perspective of many of the most influential conservative politicians and policy-makers today. As a result of what might be called the australization of American politics in recent years—that is, a political worldview increasingly coded according to identifiably “Southern” themes and icons, not to mention the growing influence of Southern and Southwestern politicians at the level of national government—we can see more clearly now the degree to which Weaver’s seemingly eccentric, often fantastic views have become not only mainstream, but perhaps even taken for granted, in 2015.[5] The “Southern Phoenix,” celebrated by Weaver for its ability to survive its own immolation and re-emerge from the ashes, now appears triumphant to a degree that the original Fugitives and Vanderbilt Agrarians could not have dreamed possible. And, as is so often the case when fantasies come to life, the result may be more frightening than even their worst nightmares forebode.

II

Outside of certain tightly circumscribed spaces of formally conservative thought such as that of the Liberty Fund, Richard M. Weaver may no longer be a household name. However, his writings and his legacy have been profoundly influential on conservative thinking, and he has been viewed as a sort of founding father or patron saint of the movement. The Heritage Foundation, for example, adopted the title of his totemic, 1948 critique of modern industrial society, Ideas Have Consequences, as its official motto when founded in 1973. A devoted student, literally and metaphorically, of the Southern Agrarians of the I’ll Take My Stand generation, Weaver embraced a certain “lost cause” view of the old Confederacy that informed his wide-ranging criticism of twentieth-century American and Western civilization. He viewed the antebellum South as the final flourishing of an idealized feudalism, doomed to fail as the forces of industry, science, and technology, together with ideological liberalism, secularism, and “equalitarianism,” undermined and ultimately destroyed its foundations. Weaver’s critique of modernity, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s, thus took the form of an almost fairy-story approach to history, in which a mythic past functioned as an exemplary model and as a foil to the lurid spectacle of the present cultural configuration, a balefully “modern” society characterized especially by its secularism, its embrace of scientific rationality, and its ineluctable process of industrialization. Weaver’s jeremiad is thus both dated, redolent of a certain pervasive interwar and postwar malaise, and enduring, as his rhetoric remains audible in social and political discourse today, particularly in all those election-year panegyrics to a “simpler” America, a paradisiacal place just over the temporal horizon, now most known to us by its mourned absence.

Weaver was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1910, but he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, as a small child, where he grew up “in the fine ‘bluegrass’ country,” as Donald Davidson noted,[6] and later received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky. In his autobiographical essay, pointedly titled “Up from Liberalism,” Weaver described the faculty there as “mostly earnest souls from the Middle Western universities, and many of them […] were, with or without knowing it, social democrats.”[7] This information is apparently supplied in order to explain Weaver’s own brief flirtation with the American Socialist Party upon graduation in 1932. Weaver then enrolled in graduate school at Vanderbilt, birthplace of I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 and thus ground zero of the literary or cultural movement by then known simply as “the Agrarians.” At Vanderbilt, Weaver studied directly under John Crowe Ransom, to whom The Southern Tradition at Bay was later dedicated, and he wrote a master’s thesis (“The Revolt Against Humanism: A Study of the New Critical Temper”), which criticized the “new” humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, among others.[8] After receiving his M.A. degree, Weaver briefly taught at Texas A&M, but was repelled by its “rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life.”[9] Weaver entered graduate school at Louisiana State University, where his teachers included two other giants of the Agrarian and American literary traditions, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The latter served as director for Weaver’s dissertation, a lengthy investigation and celebration of post-Civil War Southern literature and culture, evocatively (and provocatively) titled “The Confederate South, 1865–1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and Culture.” This book was released posthumously in 1968 as The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, and it may well be considered Weaver’s magnum opus, as I will discuss further below. After receiving his Ph.D., Weaver taught briefly at N.C. State University, before embracing “exile” at the University of Chicago, where he spent the remainder of his professional life, not counting the summers during which he returned to western North Carolina, apparently to replenish his reserves of authentic agrarian experience and to recapture the “lost capacity for wonder and enchantment.”[10] As it happens, Weaver’s celebratory vision of the Southern culture is comports all-too-well with that of a fantasy world.

Legend has it that the virulent anti-modernist eschewed such new-fangled technology as the tractor, yet he seemed to have little compunction about enjoying the convenience of the railroad and other amenities made possible by modern industrial societies. “Every spring, as soon as the last term paper was graded, he traveled by train to Weaverville [North Carolina, just north of Asheville], where he spent summers writing essays and books and plowing his patch of land with only the help of a mule-driven harness. Tractors, airplanes, automobiles, radios (and certainly television)—none of these gadgets of modern life were for Richard Weaver,” writes Joseph Scotchie, admiringly.[11] Yet Weaver also speaks about drinking coffee with pleasure, knowing well that Appalachia is not known for its cultivation of this crop. As with so much of the fantastic critique of modernity by reactionaries, there is an unexamined (perhaps even unseen) principle of selection that allows one to choose which parts of the modern world to tacitly accept, and which to ostentatiously jettison.

III

Weaver’s most significant and influential work published during his lifetime is undoubtedly Ideas Have Consequences, a title given by his editor at the University of Chicago Press but which Weaver had intended to call The Fearful Descent.[12] It is actually one of only three books published by Weaver during his own life; the others are The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) and a textbook titled simply Composition: A Course in Writing and Rhetoric (1957). Weaver recalled that Ideas Have Consequences originated in his own rather despondent musings about the state of Western Civilization in the waning months of World War II, as he experienced “progressive disillusionment” over the way the war had been conducted, and he began to wonder “whether it would not be possible to deduce, from fundamental causes, the fallacies of modern life and thinking that had produced this holocaust and would insure others.”[13] Weaver’s bold, perhaps bizarre, premise was that the civilizational crisis in the twentieth century could be traced to a much earlier philosophical turning point in the trajectory of Western thought, namely the proto-scientific nominalism of William of Occam. Weaver draws a direct line from Occam’s Razor to the most deleterious effects (in his view) of modern empiricism, materialism, and egalitarianism.

For Weaver, humanity took a wrong turn in the fourteenth century when it allegedly embraced Occam’s Razor as the guiding principle of all logical inquiry, thus condemning mankind to a sort of secular, narrow, bean-counting approach to both the natural and social worlds. Referring obliquely to Macbeth’s encounter with the weird sisters in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Weaver asserts that

Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.[14]

What follows from this is a lengthy, somewhat disjointed analysis of “the dissolution of the West,” which will include not only the critique of philosophical tendencies or declining moral codes, but also attacks on egotism in art, jazz music, and other forms of popular entertainments. It is almost a right-wing version of the near-contemporaneous Dialectic of Enlightenment, except that Weaver would not have imagined “Enlightenment” to have suggested anything other than “disaster triumphant” to begin with, and Horkheimer and Adorno was all too wary of the latent and manifest significance of the jargon of authenticity as enunciated by writers like Weaver.[15]

Although Ideas Have Consequences is not overtly “Southern” in any way, Weaver’s medievalism, which was developed not according to any deeply philological study of premodern texts (à la Tolkien) but rather from his own sense of that late flowering of chivalry in the antebellum South, indicates the degree to which his discussion of the West’s decline is actually tied to his view of the lost cause of the Confederacy. The first six chapters of Ideas Have Consequences constitute a fairly scattershot series of observations on “the various stages of modern man’s descent into chaos,” which began with his having yielded to materialism in the fourteenth century, and which in turn paved the way for the “egotism and social anarchy of the present world.”[16] The final three chapters, by contrast, are intended as restorative. That is, in them Weaver attempts to delineate the ways that modern man might resist these tendencies, reversing the movement of history, and reaping the rewards of a legacy that would presumably have flourished had only the pre-Occam metaphysical tendency ultimately prevailed. In a 1957 essay in the National Review, Weaver claimed that, contrary to the assertions of liberals, the conservatives were not so much in favor of “turning the clocks back” as “setting the clocks right.”[17] Not surprisingly, Weaver’s three prescriptions in Ideas Have Consequences would neatly align with the fantastic, medieval, or feudal system he had imagined as the dominant form of social organization in the antebellum South, although he does not highlight his regional allegiance in this, a work purportedly devoted to the study of (Western) civilization as a whole.

The first is the principle of private property, which Weaver takes to be “the last metaphysical right” available to modern man. That is, while “the ordinances of religion, the prerogatives of sex and of vocation” were “swept away by materialism” (specifically, the Reformation, changing social values, and so on), “the relationship of a man to his own has until the present largely escaped attack.”[18] Weaver calls the right to private property a “metaphysical right” because “it does not depend on social usefulness. […] It is a self-justifying right, which until lately was not called upon to show in the forum how its ‘services’ warranted its continuance in a state dedicated to collective well-being.”[19] Private property, which Weaver likens to “the philosophical concept of substance,” is depicted as providing a foundation for the renewed sense of self and being in the world. The second principle is “the power of the word”: “After securing a place in the world from which to fight, we should turn our attention to the matter of language.”[20] Weaver offers a critique of semantics as itself simply a form of nominalism, while arguing for an education in poetics and rhetoric as necessary to reclaim one’s connection to the absolute, while also remaining critical of the abuses of language in modern culture. Finally, Weaver concludes with a chapter on “piety and justice,” in which he argues that the piety, “a discipline of the will through respect,” makes justice possible by allowing man to transcend egotism with respect to three things: nature, other people, and the past.[21] Fundamentally, for Weaver, this piety issues from a chivalric tradition that he imagines as the only real hope for a reformation of the twentieth-century blasted by war, spiritually desolate, and (he does not shrink from using the term) “evil.” What is needed, Weaver concludes in the book’s final line, is “a passionate reaction, like that which flowered in the chivalry and spirituality of the Middle Ages.”[22]

As it happened, there was a place in the United States which had previously held, and in 1948 perhaps still maintained, this medieval worldview. Weaver’s beloved South, even though it was under siege from without by the forces of modernity and in peril from within by a generation of would-be modernizers, retained the virtues of an evanescing feudal tradition, which might somehow be recovered and brought into the service of civilization itself. Indeed, Weaver’s first book-length work, which only appeared in print after his death, was an elaborate examination and strident defense of this chivalric culture that once flourished beneath the Mason and Dixon line. If only its message could be distilled and disseminated, this Southern tradition might redeem the entirety of the West.

IV

The Southern Tradition at Bay occupies a unique and important place in Weaver’s corpus. Based on his doctoral thesis but published five years after his death, the book can be read as being representative of his “early” thinking on the subject and as a sort of summa of his entire literary and philosophical program at the same time. Many of the ideas that Weaver here identifies as Southern are clearly connected to those he celebrates in Ideas Have Consequences. For example, Weaver’s elaboration of the “mind” of the Old South focused on four distinctive but interrelated characteristics: the feudal system, the code of chivalry, the education of the gentleman, and the older religiousness, by which Weaver meant a non-creedal religiosity. Combined, these four factors distinguished the unique culture of the “section,” clearly differentiating its heritage from that of other parts of the United States.[23]

Weaver’s medievalism, as I mentioned before, is not rooted in the formal study of the history, philology, or philosophy of the European Middle Ages, although he draws upon certain imagery from its time and place. One might argue that Weaver’s project is literally quixotic, inasmuch as he figuratively dons the rusty armor of a bygone age to tilt at windmills which he imagines to be giants, but in an effort “in this iron age of ours to revive the age of gold or, as it is generally called, the golden age.”[24] Weaver’s tone is simultaneously elegiac and recalcitrant, mourning the lost cause or the waning of a glorious past and ardently defending its values in the present, fallen state of the world. Methodologically, Weaver’s approach is to gather selectively then-contemporary accounts, including public proclamations and individual diaries—or, often, a combination of the two, in the form of published memoirs—as well as more recent historical studies, then add his own assessments of their currency (i.e., in 1943) as evidence of an enduring, twentieth century “Mind of the South.”[25] Weaver somewhat disingenuously cautions that,

In presenting evidence that this is the traditional mind of the South, I am letting the contemporaries speak. They will seldom offer whole philosophies, and sometimes the trend of thought is clear only in the light of context; yet together they express the mind of a religious agrarian order in struggle against the forces of modernism.[26]

Needless to say, perhaps, but such a collective “mind” is likely not to be discovered if the historian were to cast the nets of his research more widely.[27] By identifying only those “true” Southerners whose opinions can thereafter be identified as authentic, Weaver anticipates all of our current politicians and pundits who seem to be forever deferring to these mythical “real Americans” whose viewpoints are curiously at odds with the actual history of the present. After laying out the feudal heritage which characterizes the mind and culture of the South in the opening chapter, Weaver by turns examines the antebellum and postbellum defense of the Southern way of life, the perspectives of Confederate soldiers and the reminiscences of others during the Civil War (or “the second American Revolution”), the work of selected Southern fiction writers, and then the reformers or internal critics who, in Weaver’s view, effectively managed to take the fight out of the “fighting South.”[28]

Weaver concedes by the end that “the Old South may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live.”[29] It is a disturbing and prophetic line, suggestive of how much the Southern heritage might be abstracted, idealized, and then transferred to distant places and times. Comparing his own situation to that of a Henry Adams, who, “wearied with the plausibilites of his day, looked for some higher reality in the thirteenth-century synthesis of art and faith,” Weaver imagines that the old Confederacy, with its feudal hierarchies and chivalric cultural values, may yet become a model for the social formations to come. Calling the Old South “the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world,” Weaver concludes:

It is this refuge of sentiments and values, of spiritual congeniality, of belief in the word, of reverence for symbolism, whose existence haunts the nation. It is damned for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.[30]

Behind this elevated rhetoric lies the hoary old dream, indistinct threat, and rebel yell: the South will rise again!

The title of The Southern Tradition at Bay is provocatively descriptive. Since its purview is the period of American history between 1865 and 1910, following the crushing defeat of the former Confederacy and the disastrous period of Reconstruction—not to mention advances in science, the rise of a more industrial mode of production, and the emergence of modernism in the arts and culture—the study’s elaboration of a cognizable “Southern Tradition” rooted in unreconstructed agrarianism and adherence to the ideals of the old Confederacy is intended to establish it as a preferred counter-tradition to that of the victorious North and to the united States in general. Moreover, the phrase “at bay” is suggestive not of defeat or conquest, but of temporary inconvenience; it refers especially to being momentarily held up, kept at a distance, but by no means out of the game. Such an accomplished rhetor as Weaver would no doubt be aware that the phrase derives from the French abayer, “to bark,” and that it probably referred to dogs that were prevented from approaching further to attack and that were thus relegated to merely barking at their prey. (The image of a group of Southerners barking at an uncomprehending North may be all too appropriate when revisiting I’ll Take My Stand, come to think of it.) In other words, The Southern Tradition at Bay’s title nicely encapsulates two powerful aspects of its argument: that the Southern Tradition exists, present tense, long after its ancien régime was disrupted by war and by modernization; and that it was not ever defeated, much less destroyed, but merely kept in abeyance from the then dominant, though less creditable national culture. Weaver’s vision of the South does not imagine a residual or emergent social formation, to mention Raymond Williams’s well-known formulation,[31] but rather another dominant, yet somehow suppressed or isolated, form which remained in constant tension with the only apparently victorious North. Weaver’s mood is sometimes melancholy, befitting his sense of the “lost cause,” but his conviction that the South ought to rise again, whether he believed it was practically feasible or not, is clear throughout.

Thus, the idea of a distinctively Southern tradition being temporarily held “at bay” suits Weaver’s argument well. However, this was not the original title of the study. When he presented it as his doctoral dissertation at Louisiana State University, where his thesis advisor was Cleanth Brooks,[32] Weaver gave it a much more provocative and politically charged title: “The Confederate South, 1865–1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and Culture.” The difference is not particularly subtle. Here it is asserted that the “Confederate South,” not just a tradition, itself exists outside of the more limited lifespan of the C.S.A., and that its mind and culture—not merely those of a South, a recognizable section of the United States, but those of the Confederacy—survived the aftermath of the Civil War, a conflict which Weaver dutifully names the “second American Revolution.”[33] Weaver submitted the manuscript to the University of North Carolina Press in 1943, but it was summarily rejected. I have found no evidence one way or another, but I like to think that the publishing arm of the university presided over by Frank Porter Graham declined to publish the execrable apologia of the Confederacy’s “survival,” with its idyllic portrait of human bondage and of racial bigotry, on not only academic but also political grounds. The story is probably less interesting than that, for although the book makes a passionate case for a certain worldview, the dissertation’s extremely selective portrayal of the postbellum culture of the south almost certainly rendered its conclusions dubious from the perspective of academic historians and philosophers. Most likely, Weaver’s omissions, as well as his renunciation of any sense of objectivity or nonpartisanship, led to the study’s remaining unpublished during his lifetime. In any case, its eventual publication in 1968, a transformative moment in U.S. politics and society, makes for a rather intriguing, if unhappy, coincidence. The “Southern strategy,” conceived by Harry Dent and launched by the Nixon campaign that very year, had in The Southern Tradition at Bay its historico-philosophical touchstone.

V

It is all too noteworthy that the “mind and culture” that Weaver identifies as surviving in the aftermath of the Civil War is, at once, generalized so as to extend to the entirety of the American South and limited to a fairly tiny slice of that section’s actual population. Weaver makes no bones about the fact the he wanted to consider only the elite members of that society as representative of this tradition. Asserting that “it is a demonstrable fact that the group in power speaks for the country,” Weaver unapologetically writes that, “[i]n assaying the Southern tradition, therefore, I have taken the spirit which dominated,” thus ignoring Southern abolition societies, for example.[34] He also ignores the majority of the people. In order to make his case, Weaver pays little attention to white people who are not aristocratic lords of their own fiefdoms or soldiers who fought in the Civil War, which is to say, Weaver largely overlooks the poor multitudes who vastly outnumbered the wealthy planters, military leaders, and governors. Also, though not unexpectedly, the black population, a not inconsiderable percentage of the populace in these states, is treated far worse, in this account; black Southerners are not ignored, but rather are called out for special treatment in assessing their significant role in making possible the this culture and its tradition.[35]

Indeed, Weaver refers to blacks in the South as “the alien race,” as if he cannot understand that persons of African descent are no more or less alien to the lands of the Americas than are those of European descent. “Alien” cannot here mean “foreign,” since Weaver highlights the Southerner’s kinship to the Europeans, whether genealogically or with respect to social values. Weaver almost blames the black servants for being “inferior,” the mere fact of which itself could lead to abuse and therefore can reflect badly on the moral constitution of the white superiors. For example, after praising the idyllic state of paternalism in which “[t]he master expected of his servants loyalty; the servants of the master interest and protection,” and going so far to note that even at present, “so many years after emancipation,” the Southern plantation owner will routinely “defray the medical expenses of his Negroes” and “get them out of jail when they have been committed for minor offenses,” Weaver concedes that

This is the spirit of feudalism in its optative aspect; some abuses were inevitable, and in the South lordship over an alien and primitive race had less favorable effects upon the character of the slaveowners. It made them arrogant and impatient, and it filled them with boundless self-assurance. Even the children, noting the deference paid to their elders by the servants, began at an early age to take on airs of command. […] These traits [i.e., irritability, impatience, vengefulness], which were almost invariably noted by Northerners and by visiting Englishmen, gave Southerners a reputation away from home which they thought baseless and inspired by malice.[36]

Weaver never doubts  whether the feudal paternalism of the plantation owner, pre- or post-emancipation, to “his Negroes” would have appeared quite so optative in its aspect to the servants themselves. Informed readers, regardless of their own political views, cannot help but question this formulation.

In Weaver’s view, all servants—almost exclusively understood to be members of an “alien race” as well as being a subaltern class—on a Southern plantation are either happy and loyal or hopelessly deluded. During the Civil War, for example, “the alien race, which numbered about four millions in the South, kept its accustomed place, excepting those who through contact with the Federal armies were won away from adherence to ‘massa’ and ‘ol’ mistis’.”[37] This appears in a section called “The Negroes in Transition,” within a long chapter titled “Diaries and Reminiscences of the Second American Revolution,” and Weaver’s unmistakable conclusion is that the black population of the South was almost entirely better off under the system of slavery. Indeed, from his blinkered perspective, the African Americans under consideration would be better off as slaves precisely because they are more naturally suited to that condition. This position constitutes not merely an apologia of human bondage but also a casual acceptance of the most foul racial bigotry. Weaver cannot seem to imagine a reasonable reader who would question white supremacy, which he and the authorities he approvingly cites take to be a matter of fact. “The Northern conception that the Negro was merely a sunburned white man, ‘whose only crime was the color of his skin,’ found no converts at all among the people who had lived and worked with him.”[38] Weaver thus intimates that those, such as the Northerners, who believed otherwise were merely ignorant of the facts familiar to any and all with the least bit of experiential knowledge. Similarly, when Weaver writes that “[m]ore than one writer took the view that it was impossible for the two races to dwell together unless the blacks remained in a condition approximating slavery,” he offers not a word to gainsay the view, and he tacitly endorses it throughout the book.[39]

Weaver’s somewhat disingenuous assertion that he is “letting the contemporaries speak” for themselves is hardly an excuse for this profoundly racist account. Even if he relied only on direct quotations, which he certainly does not, Weaver had already conceded that he was rather selective in how he would approach his project. Needless to say, perhaps, but “The Negroes in Transition” section makes no reference whatsoever to any black authorities; in fact, Weaver here seems to rely entirely on the remembrances of Southern belles, as the footnotes in this section refer exclusively to autobiographies or memoirs written by white women, including one titled A Belle of the Fifties.[40] (The suggestion that free blacks represented a threat to white women is not so subtly hinted at in the pages.) Weaver quotes liberally from the women’s writings, but he frequently editorializes and supplements their mostly first-person perceptions with an almost scientific assessment, expounding on the laws governing society and nature.[41] For example, having just mentioned both slavery and race, and therefore leaving no doubt in the mind of the readers as to the racial criteria by which a social hierarchy of the type he is endorsing would be established, Weaver asserts: “[o]ut of the natural reverence for intellect and virtue there arises an impulse to segregation, which broadly results in coarser natures, that is, those of duller mental and moral sensibility, being lodged at the bottom and those of more refined at the top.”[42] Indeed, Weaver goes so far as to credit the endemic racism of the Southerner with a kind of moral superiority over those who lack this good sense. He argues that, in the Southerner’s “endeavor to grade men by their moral and intellectual worth,” his defense of slavery and racial hierarchy “indicates an ethical awareness” missing from many Northerners’ perspectives.[43]

That politics in the United States has, since 1968, become increasingly characterized by racial division is both controversial and indubitable. The “post-racial” America presided over by Barack Obama has witnessed some of the most acrimonious, racially-inflected public discourse and debate in years. Yet open appeals to racial justice or to discriminatory practices are considered gauche. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, a form of “dog-whistle politics” has infiltrated nearly all political rhetoric in recent decades. Perhaps the most infamous example of this “dog-whistle” political strategy can be found in Lee Atwater’s remarkably candid revelation in a 1981 interview. The former Strom Thurmond acolyte, who later served in the Reagan White House, then as George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign manager, and who later became chairman of the Republican National Committee, Atwater is acknowledged as one of the most astute political strategists of his generation. In speaking (anonymously, at the time) of the Reagan campaign’s far more elegant and effective version of the Southern strategy, Atwater explained:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than Nigger, nigger.”[44]

The fact that abstract economic issues, which presumably would affect both whites and blacks in the relatively poor Southern states in more-or-less equal measure, are so effective as code words for traditional, race-baiting tactics of a previous generation—the era of Willis Smith, in fact—demonstrates the degree to which Weaver’s feudal hierarchies maintain themselves, now in an utterly fantastic way as a vague threat, well into the late twentieth century or early twenty-first. As Atwater suggested, Southern white voters are willing to endorse policies that actually harm them, so long as a byproduct of those policies is that “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” This too, it seems, has much to do with the survival of a mind and culture in the aftermath of slavery and war, and so it is not altogether surprising that Weaver’s examination of the Southern tradition “at bay” focuses so intently on demonstrating why the black population of the South ought to remain subjugated to the white population as the era of civil rights, desegregation, and modernization dawns on the region.[45]

VI

In his appreciative remembrance of I’ll Take My Stand, written on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of its publication, Weaver invoked the image of the “Southern Phoenix,” a mythic reference to a being that had regenerated itself from the ashes following its own fiery destruction. Weaver uses this figure not so much to recall how the Agrarians whose work constituted that epochal text had themselves gone on to greatness, even if the volume had been ridiculed and dismissed by Northern critics in the 1930s. Weaver is also thinking of the tenets and values of the Old South, those that the Vanderbilt Fugitives and Agrarians embraced and promoted, which must have seemed retrograde, even malignant to so many in 1930, but which had reemerged and flourished amid an ascendant conservatism just beginning to take shape nationally in 1960. Yet, for all its usefulness as a metaphor, the phoenix is probably also an apt figure for Weaver’s own conservative vision, since—like an imaginary creature taken from the provinces of mythology—Weaver’s image of the Southern tradition, whether at bay or on the offensive, is profoundly fantastic. This imaginary tradition is rooted in a world that almost certainly never existed, not on a wide scale at any rate, and the polemical forces of Weaver’s argument are directed at a foe that has been conceived as an immense Leviathan, but which we today know to have been largely chimerical.

At times, this argument becomes almost comical. In explaining the importance of “the last metaphysical right,” private property, for example, Weaver cites the example of Thoreau,[46] although the latter’s notorious experiment in living deliberately required him to purchase, not build, a prefabricated hut, then to place it and himself on property owned by another (Emerson, in fact), but which he was permitted to dwell upon rent-free. Far from demonstrating the self-sufficiency and resolve of the individual, Thoreau’s experiment might be taken as exemplary of a kind of localized welfare system; one need not punch the clock at the local factory if one lives off the generosity and largess of family and friends. However, as we have seen increasingly in the United States in recent years, the receipt of corporate and other forms of welfare in no way prevents the recipients from bashing the government for offering support to others. The Republican Party’s adoption of the “We Built It” slogan in 2012 offers a tellingly Thoreauvian fantasy, one where it is possible to accept the public’s funding while insisting upon absolute independence from the commonweal.

Given the importance of a sense of place and of community to Weaver’s fantastic vision of a medieval heritage, such rampant individualism—an ideology subtending the basic neoliberal projection of free markets and autonomous economic actors—seems quite foreign. Indeed, it is odd to talk about Weaver as a forebear to contemporary conservatism. Certainly the economic neoliberalism which celebrates unfettered free markets and the geopolitical neoconservatism which glories in globalization and preemptive military engagements are a far cry from Weaver’s fanciful nostalgia for an idealistic feudalism founded upon rigid social hierarchies, chivalric codes of ethics, and a powerful, culture-shaping religion or religiosity.[47] In his own writings, we can see Weaver’s strong aversion to the emergent globalization and even nationalization, which he views as corrupting the properly regionalist values he favored. Weaver’s worldview would not have allowed him to embrace the preemptive war strategies championed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz during the various military conflicts of the past 30 years. Moreover, Weaver’s ardent defense of the humanities—recall his loathing for the educational and cultural aura of Texas A&M, now home to the George [H. W.] Bush Presidential Library—is entirely at odds with the views on higher education, the arts, philosophy, and “high” culture held by the most prominent and visible members of the G.O.P. today.  Yet, the sectarianism of Weaver’s view paved the way for contemporary neoconservative politics and policies. Weaver’s well-nigh Schmittian, Us-versus-Them antagonism, requires us to envision not merely a Western civilization opposed to its non-western rivals but a truer, more valuable “Southern” civilization against the putatively uncivilized rest of the United States. The loathsome, omnipresent discourse about “real” Americans and what constitutes them is a legacy of the Southern Agrarian traditions apotheosized by Weaver’s philosophy.

Indeed, the particular labels—conservative, neoconservative, neoliberal, and so forth—are not necessarily helpful in understanding the dominant political and cultural discourses in the United States in the twenty-first century. As Paul A. Bové has observed, “[m]any critics of the Far Right movement conservatism mischaracterize it. It is not an epiphenomenon of neoliberalism. In fact, the popular elements of this movement, of its electoral coalition, resent the economic and cultural consequences of neoliberalism and globalization in politics and culture.”[48] To many of the policies and even most of the ideas of the neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Cheney, and both Presidents Bush, Weaver and his beloved Agrarians would almost certainly object. However, the cultural and intellectual foundations of the neoconservatives’ positions, not to mention the fact of their being elected or appointed to offices of great power in the first place, owes much to an ideological transformation of U.S. intellectual culture whose fons et origo may be found in the fantastic vision of a distinctively Southern exceptionalism.

One might well name this the australization of American politics, as the Southern section’s purportedly unique culture has tended, since the 1960s, to be more and more representative of a national conservative movement. This movement, which has become perhaps the most influential force within the Republican Party at a moment when the conservative politics has itself become more prominent in the United States, thus tends to be the dominant force in national, and increasingly international, politics as well. It should not be forgotten that the rightward shift even in the Democratic Party can itself be linked to this increasingly australized politics, as both Georgia’s Jimmy Carter and Arkansas’s Bill Clinton emerged nationally as the preferable, because more conservative, candidates who would stand up to the old-fashioned liberals in their own party (inevitably symbolized by Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, or Jesse Jackson).[49] In their commitment to economic growth, particularly that made possible by increasingly corporate or industrial development, these conservative Southern Democrats would have earned the agrarian-minded Weaver’s contempt, but their rhetorical and ideological commitments align far better with the agrarian discourse than did the expansive liberalism of the New Deal or the Great Society. Weaver would undoubtedly decry the rapid growth of the South’s population in recent decades, since that growth has been generated in large part by ever more industrial or urban development, but he would probably delight in seeing the rust of the Rust Belt as unionization, heavy industry, and traditional urbanism has declined in the North and Northeast. The shifting numbers of electoral votes in favor of Southern states is also a real consideration for any political or cultural program interested in preserving or expanding Southern “values” in the United States. The fall of the hated North, in this view, is almost as sweet as the South’s rising again.

The costs of this australization of American politics are incalculable, as may be inferred from the increasingly vicious public discourse with respect to all manner of things, including welfare and taxation, education, science, the environment, individual rights, foreign adventures, war, domestic surveillance (a form of paternalism), and so forth. As far back as 1941, W. J. Cash had concluded his study of The Mind of the South by noting the “characteristic vices” of that culture:

Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism—these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.[50]

Taken out of their original context, these words seem all too timely in the twenty-first century, with the events of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 or Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015, among many other less spectacular and more pervasive examples, resounding throughout the body politic. In Cash’s final lines, he abjured any temptation to play the role of prophet, declaring that it would be “a brave man” who would venture definite prophecies, and it would be “a madman who would venture them in the face of the forces sweeping over the world in 1940.”[51] Bravery or madness notwithstanding, Cash likely could not have imagined the degree to which the characteristic vices of the South in his time could become so widespread to have become the characteristics of a national American “mind” tout court in the next century.

Moreover, as should be obvious, the australization of American politics is not simply a matter of political leaders or voters residing in the southern parts of the United States. The pervasiveness of a certain identifiably Southern cultural signifiers within mainstream political discourse, particularly in the more conservative members of the Republican Party but also throughout the public policy and electioneering rhetoric of both major parties, signals a victory for that fantastic or idealistic “mind and culture” so celebrated by Weaver and his Agrarian forebears. It is a terrifying prospect for many, but the vision of the intransigent Southern traditionalist now operating from a position of broad-based cultural and political power on a national, indeed an international, stage might be the apotheosis of Weaver’s grand historical investigation into the region’s purportedly distinctive past. As Weaver put it in a 1957 essay,

It may be that after a long period of trouble and hardship, brought on in my opinion by being more sinned against than sinning, this unyielding Southerner will emerge as a providential instrument for saving this nation. […] If that time should come, the nation as a whole would understand the spirit that marched with Lee and Jackson and charged with Pickett.[52]

For most people residing in the United States, including many of us in the South (like me, some of whose ancestors did march with these men in the early 1860s), the prospect of a neo-Confederate savior of the nation or world is horrifying, like a mythological monster assuming worldly power. Sifting through the ashes of the triumphant Southern Phoenix, we are likely to find much of value has been destroyed.

Notes

[1]  Quoted in Julian M. Pleasants and Augustus M. Burns III, Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 183. On the term “dog-whistle politics,” see Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[2] Richard M. Weaver, “Agrarianism in Exile,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, ed. George M. Curtis III and James J. Thompson Jr. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), 40, 44.

[3] Weaver, “The Southern Phoenix,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, 17.

[4]  See Paul A. Bové, “Agriculture and Academe: America’s Southern Question,” in Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 113–142.

[5]  Recent events concerning the removal of the “Confederate Flag,” the notorious symbol of racism wielded by the KKK and others, from state capitols and other official sites in the South appears to be a surprising turn of events, although cynics could argue that, in turning attention away for gun violence and particularly violence against black citizens and other minorities, the flag issue has provided a convenient cover, allowing the media to ignore more urgent social problems in the wake of the Charleston massacre. Still, symbols are powerful, and the removal of this symbol is itself a hopeful sign as even conservative politicians and pundit have realized, all too late, what the embrace of the lost Confederacy has cost them on a moral level. See, e.g., Russ Douthat, “For the South, Against the Confederacy,” New York Times blog (June 24, 2015): http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/for-the-south-against-the-confederacy/?_r=0.

[6]  Donald Davidson, “The Vision of Richard Weaver: A Foreword,” in Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, eds. George Core and M. E. Bradford (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), 17.

[7] Weaver, “Up from Liberalism” [1958–59], in The Vision of Richard Weaver, ed. Joseph Scotchie (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 20.

[8]  See Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver, 1910–1963: A Life of the Mind (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 56 –58.

[9] Weaver, “Up from Liberalism,” 23.

[10]  Ibid., 28.

[11]  Joseph Scotchie, “Introduction: From Weaverville to Posterity,” in The Vision of Richard Weaver, 9–10.

[12]  Ibid., 9.

[13]  Weaver, “Up from Liberalism,” 31. Notwithstanding the use of the word “holocaust,” Weaver makes no mention of the Nazis or the concentration camps in this essay; rather, his example is “the abandonment of Finland by Britain and the United States” (31).

[14]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 2–3.

[15]  See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), 3. See also Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

[16]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 129.

[17]  Weaver, “On Setting the Clock Right,” In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, ed. Ted J. Smith III (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 559–566.

[18]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 131.

[19]  Ibid., 132.

[20]  Ibid., 148.

[21]  Ibid., 172.

[22]  Ibid., 187.

[23]  In a later essay, Weaver compares the difference between the American North and the South to that between the United States and England, France, or China. In the same essay, Weaver adds that “The South […] still looks among a man’s credentials for where he’s from, and not all places, even in the South, are equal. Before a Virginian, a North Carolinian is supposed to stand cap in hand. And faced with the hauteur of an old family from Charleston, South Carolina, even a Virginian may shuffle his feet and look uneasy.” See “The Southern Tradition,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver,  210, 225.

[24]  Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1950), 149. Apparently, many conservatives would not object to such a comparison. For example, in his history on the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Lee Edwards approvingly begins by saying of its founder, “Frank Chodorov had been tilting against windmills all his life.” See Edwards, Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003), 1.

[25]  At no point does Weaver cite Cash’s The Mind of the South (originally published in 1941), which in this context must be seen as a sort of “absent presence” for Weaver and others who carried the torch for the Agrarians in the 1940s and beyond. The Mind of the South appeared while Weaver was working on his dissertation, and Weaver’s own study might even be seen as a tactical critique of, or at least alterative to, Cash’s celebrated work. See W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1991). Although these two native North Carolinian authors identify some of the same characteristics and even arrive at similar conclusions about the “mind of the South,” they also maintain rather different social and political positions. For one thing, Cash does not see a feudal or aristocratic Southern character as praiseworthy, whereas Weaver’s entire defense of the Southern tradition rests on his admiration for and allegiance toward the aristocratic virtues of the archetypal Southerner.

[26]  Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, 44.

[27]  One legitimate critique of Cash’s The Mind of the South was that it focused primarily on the attitudes and customary habits associated with Cash’s own Piedmont region of North Carolina (which happens to be my native region as well), thus underestimating the divergences to be found in the Tidewater zones to the east or the “Deep South” below and to the west. Weaver’s Southern Tradition at Bay does not limit its approach by regions, giving more or less equal space to views from all parts of the South, but it does severely restrict itself to materials best suited to make its argument with respect to a feudal system. Hence, Weaver tends to ignore the experiences of those who did not live on large estates or plantations, which is to say, Weaver omits the experiences of the vast majority of Southerners. If Cash’s study could be faulted for its Mencken-esque journalistic techniques—Cash’s original article, “The Mind of the South,” did appear in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, after all—and its lack of intellectual rigor, Weaver’s more academic study (it was a PhD dissertation, of course), in its questionable method and especially in its selectivity, also raises doubts about the “mind” it purports to lay bare.

[28]  Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, 387.

[29]  Ibid., 396.

[30]  Ibid., 391.

[31]  See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–127.

[32]  Weaver’s advisor had been the cultural historian, literary critic, and biographer Arlin Turner, but Brooks stepped in only near the end to serve as the head of Weaver’s thesis committee. In his biography, Young reports that “Weaver was in the final stages of writing his dissertation when Turner left LSU to take a position at Duke University; Cleanth Brooks became his advisor at that point and oversaw the work to its conclusion” (78). However, as far as I can tell, Turner did not arrive at Duke until 1953, ten years after Weaver received his Ph.D. degree. The more likely reason for the change in advisor, as Fred Douglas Young writes, was that Turner was “called up for service in the U.S. Navy,” which is why Weaver asked Brooks to serve as dissertation director at the last minute (see Young, Richard M. Weaver, 67). I am not prepared to speculate on the relationship between teacher and student, but I might note that Turner, a native Texan who wrote a well-regarded biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and later became the editor of American Literature, likely did not share his former student’s strictly sectarian views with respect to the opposed and irreconcilable cultures of the North and the South.

[33]  See Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, 41, 231–275.

[34]  Ibid., 30.

[35]  Although it lies well outside the scope of the present essay, it would be interesting to consider the other side of Weaver’s celebratory medievalism by looking a Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974). Genovese also identifies a patriarchal, paternalistic society in which religion or religiosity played a crucial role, but he focuses attention on the essential contributions of the slaves in forming this distinctively Southern culture. Genovese, then a Marxist historian influenced by Gramsci, among others, later became a notoriously conservative thinker in his own right, a shift that coincided—perhaps not coincidentally?—with his growing interest in the Agrarians of the I’ll Take My Stand era, which culminated in a book whose title could have come directly from Weaver’s own pen: see Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

[36]  Ibid., 55–57.

[37]  Ibid., 259. Being “won away” is, for Weaver, a sign of the servant’s delusion. Indeed, this line follows directly from a section which concluded that “the blacks suffered as much maltreatment as the whites, the [Union] soldiery being as ready to snatch the silver watch of the slave as the gold one of his master” (258).

[38]  Ibid., 261.

[39]  Ibid., 173. Weaver lists a number of postbellum incidents, including “disturbing reports of Negro voodooism,” as evidence that Southern blacks, now lacking the beneficial effects of a civilizing servitude, would “soon relapse into savagery” (261–262).

[40]  Incidentally, Weaver’s overall assessment of women’s rights is not much more salutary than his position on civil rights for persons of color, at least with respect to the decline of the West. In Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver laments that, although “[w]omen would seem to be the natural ally in any campaign to reverse” the anti-chivalric modern trends that have rendered Western civilization so spiritually vacant, in fact, they have not. “After the gentlemen went, the lady had to go too. No longer protected, the woman now has her career, in which she makes a drab pilgrimage from two-room apartment to job to divorce court” (180). Without chivalry, Weaver concludes, there can be no ladies.

[41]  See The Southern Tradition at Bay, 268.

[42]  Ibid., 36–37.

[43]  Ibid., 35.

[44]  Quoted in Alexander P. Lamis, “The Two-Party South: From the 1960s to the 1990s,” in Southern Politics in the 1990s, ed. Alexander P. Lamis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 8.

[45]  Contrast this view with the lament by which Albert D. Kirwan chooses to conclude his near-contemporaneous, 1951 study of postbellum Mississippi politics: “As for the Negro, whose presence in such large numbers in Mississippi has given such a distinctive influence to its politics, his lot did not change throughout this period. No one thought of him save to hold him down. No one sought to improve him. […] He was and is the neglected man in Mississippi, though not the forgotten man.” See Kirwan, The Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1875–1925 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 314.

[46]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 132. Thoreau seems to be the one Yankee whom Weaver is willing to consider a non-barbarian. See also The Southern Tradition at Bay, 41: “Southerners apply the term ‘Yankee’ as the Greeks did ‘barbarian.’ The kinship of ideas cannot be overlooked.”

[47]  Space does not permit a full consideration of the matter, but Weaver’s embrace of a certain Southern “non-creedal religiosity” would not necessarily seem to fit easily with the rise of the religious right in the 1980s and beyond, particularly when considering the prominence of certain denominations and organization, like the Southern Baptist Convention, in political and cultural debates of recent decades. However, one might also recognize the apparently Southern accent with which must of the new political religiosity has been voiced on a national level, which suggests another aspect of the australization of American politics.

[48]  Paul A. Bové, A More Conservative Place: Intellectual Culture in the Bush Era (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 10.

[49]  Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, made his name nationally as the Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization founded in the aftermath of the 1984 Reagan re-election landslide. The D.L.C. was established the express aim of promoting more conservative policies within the Party and nationally, and its leadership largely consisted of Southerners, not coincidentally.

[50]  Cash, The Mind of the South, 428–429.

[51]  Ibid., 429.

[52]  Weaver, “The South and the American Union,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, 256.