(iPoster) Conservative Anticapitalism during the Great Depression: The Southern Agrarians

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

This article is about a conservative critique of capitalism I call romantic anticapitalism, which sought cultural renewal through a racialized moral economy. The theoretical importance of my argument is to examine the intersection between racism within romantic anticapitalism, and I show how the doctrine appealed to white racial identity to reenchant capitalism’s decontextualized social relations. I examine an example of romantic anticapitalism forged in the Depression-era South: the political theory of Donald Davidson, a member of the Southern Agrarians. Drawing on archival material, I show how the Southern Agrarians were part of a transnational romantic anticapitalist tendency that sought to counter capitalism’s abstract domination with a return to allegedly concrete forms of life—subsistence production and mythologies of white purity. Today, we see the stirrings of romantic anticapitalism, as observers turn to a language of vitality and race to re-personalize capitalism.

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