The Fourth Annual Abbeville Institute Summer School was held at the Young-Sanders Center June 18-22, 2006. Forty-six participants gathered to discuss "The Southern Agrarian Tradition." The occasion was the 75th anniversary of the publication of the Southern classic I'll Take My Stand by the Nashville Agrarians. This book--still in print--is a penetrating critique of American modernity. The task of the summer school was to explore the agrarian tradition, what it has meant to Southerners in the past and what it can mean today.

Dr. Thomas Fleming, a classical scholar and editor of Chronicles, A Magazine American Culture began with a lecture on "The Greek and Roman Agrarian Tradition." The agrarian tradition is not a nostalgic view of life on the farm, but a timeless vision of man's connection to God, nature, and society, salient to any time and place, but especially to an industrial age such as our own which tends to subvert it. As a philosophical ideal, it stretches back to the classical culture of ancient Greece and republican Rome. The South retained this classical cultural tradition long after the North abandoned it.

Professor Marco Bassani (the University of Milan, Italy) spoke on "Thomas Jefferson's State's Rights Agrarianism," pointing out that an essential feature of agrarianism is self-government on a small human scale. Its enemy is the centralization of political and economic power. Jefferson sought to provide constitutional protection for this value with his doctrine of State's rights.

Tim Manning, assistant editor of Southern Partisan, opened the unexplored topic of "Jefferson as a Southerner." He showed that in the last eight years of his life, confronting the Missouri Compromise and the first rise of radical abolitionism, Jefferson marked out a moral and political position that was essentially that of later Southerners who would eventually secede from the Union. Had Jefferson lived into the next generation, he would have been a Confederate. This thought enables us to see Jefferson's whole career, and indeed American history, in a different light. Jefferson was once asked when he would write his political philosophy. He replied that he did not have to because it had already been written by his fellow Virginian and contemporary John Taylor.

Joseph Stromberg, in "John Taylor's Critique of Political and Economic Centralization," showed how Taylor,,r in five books (which should be better known), laid the groundwork for the long standing Southern critique of how big business and finance use the coercive power of government for profit while passing it off as the public good.

Clyde Wilson (University of South Carolina), in "Agrarianism After Taylor," gave a brief history of this Southern critique from Taylor to our own time. He observed that Southern Agrarians are often misunderstood because they defend private property and free enterprise while at the same time criticizing "capitalism" and "industrialism." But there is no contradiction. By "capitalism," in the negative sense, they mean the use of state power to benefit large industrial and financial interests. When "capitalists" in this sense talk of protecting property, they do not mean landed property or small businesses, but what Taylor called "paper" property: stocks, bonds, and currency which, once under state control, can be and always are manipulated by special interests for their benefit. The real defenders of capitalism and industry, properly understood, are agrarian thinkers such as Jefferson and Taylor. Their principles were embodied in the Confederate Constitution which sought to privilege free enterprise, to encourage the wide distribution of real property, and, consequently, to provide the widely distributed economic base necessary for local self government. In a second lecture Professor Wilson examined the work of the late M. E. Bradford who was a student of the Nashville Agrarians and who developed I'll Take My Stand's critique in a new and more sophisticated way that compelled public attention even from hostile critics. The Abbeville Institute would not exist if it were not for Bradford's work.

Turning from political economy to culture, Professor Bill Wilson (University of Virginia) gave two lectures on "Andrew Lytle, The Last of the Nashville Agrarians." He raised the question of why Lytle turned to fiction in developing his agrarian critique. Lytle held that genuine culture springs from small human scale communities. These have all but been destroyed by modern political and economic centralization and the mass "culture" it has produced. The Southerner, living in this wasteland, must view himself as an uprooted character whose world has largely vanished, and hence his view of himself is properly understood through fiction. In this unusual condition, fiction becomes both a lens through which to see our condition and a guide to better it.

Peter Jones (formerly Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and a founding member of the Abbeville Institute) in his lecture "What Cements Society?" explored to topic of manners, conversation, and civility which the South cultivated. He traced the history of this ideal of "the delight to be had in human society for its own sake" to its roots in 17th and 18th century French salons (founded and governed by women) and in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Michael Goodloe (Christendom College) in "The Nashville Agrarians and Modern Gnosticism" showed that modern ideologies as well as economic and political centralization have played an essential role in destroying the human scale society favored by the agrarian tradition. Ideologies, though presented as the work of pure reason, are in reality pathological fantasies and obsessions. Perhaps the most comprehensive critique of ideologies as pathologies of reason is the work of Eric Voegelin. Goodloe argued that in I'll Take My Stand we have a critique of ideologies similar to Voegelin's, and that we can profitably read the former in the light of the latter.

Sean Busick (Kentucky Wesleyan University) gave an entertaining and informative lecture on "Political Barbecues of the Old South." These were large social gatherings held frequently throughout the South from the late 17th century on. Thousands and, at times, tens of thousands attended them. They were a natural form of entertainment and enjoyment that sprung from an agrarian world. It was a world the people made for themselves (which is a constant agrarian theme) and contained dancing, singing, music, political speeches, games, business, romance, and the sheer joy of conversation. Because the South retained its agrarian traditions longer, barbecues, as communal gatherings, lasted longer. Indeed they are still to be found in the South. And even where they have died out, the ubiquity of barbecue remains, each region having its own recipe and style and jealously defending it.

Tobias Lanz (Professor of Government and International Studies at the University of South Carolina), lectured on "The Agrarianism of Wendell Berry." Wendell Berry abandoned his teaching position in New York and returned to his family farm in Kentucky where he has spent his life farming, writing poetry, fiction, and philosophical essays defending the agrarian vision of the good life. Wendell Berry's reputation as poet and critic is global, and shows the power of the Southern agrarian tradition to stimulate and inspire the humane imagination An intellectual and moral understanding of this tradition is needed today more than ever as we move into the 21st century, under a regime of monstrous political and economic centralization ruling over millions of uprooted individuals trying to find their bearings in a mass society.

On Tuesday evening Deborah Brinson, who was home schooled, raised on a farm, and enters college this year to study music, gave an hour performance of Southern and Celtic songs on the Celtic harp. She ended the performance with "An Agrarian Ballad," written by her especially for the occasion and sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."