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 »
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be... accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinnin...g hair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet p...erhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a "will to renewal." T...his is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of "crises"Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no "crisis," there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the re...ceiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it. It was possible to live through the decade preoccupied by the mortgage and the pence you saved on your income tax. It was also possible for those of us who saw what was happening to turn our eyes in a different direction; but what, in another decade, had been a trip to the clap clinic was now a trip to the mortuary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »