Side by side with the Marxists of the northern cities, flourishing in the same situation and starting from the same premise, there... appeared at the beginning of the thirties the second of the anti-capitalist movements of the decade, the movement called Southern Agrarianism. If the Marxists wished to give power to the masses, the Agrarians meant to give it to an educated aristocracy ruling over an eighteenth-century economy. Where the Marxists foresaw an ever-growing concentration of industrial activity in units that were to increase in size, the Agrarians strove to break up the large productive units into groups of small ones, and, through decentralization, return to the society of Jefferson's time, when the great bulk of the people owned their own land. The Agrarians, consequently, looked as strenuously at the past as the Marxists did to the future. Where the Marxists drew their inspiration from the socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century, the Agrarians went back to Plato and his philosopher-kings vigorously trained to rule the state, to Carlyle and superman formulators of modern times, to Chesterton and Belloc and their strong religious orthodoxy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »