The Quality of the South

The Lasting South, edited by Louis D. Rubin Jr. and James Jackson Kilpatrick (Regnery, $5.50), is a book of essays on the cultural antagonism between the South and the prevailing statism of Liberal democracy, and on the threat to the South of final extinction before statism’s mass and commonplace mind. The contributors are chiefly from the Eastern seaboard and the lower South. There are a few from the border states and even beyond the region, whose presence focuses attention upon the South as representative of a state of mind within the Christian inheritance, and therefore not restricted to any particular place.

This state of mind is conservative, in the sense that it preserves: Mr. Kilpatrick in “Conservatism and the South” quotes Mr. Lincoln, “adhering to the old and tried, against the new and untried.” But Mr. Lincoln reversed himself in the struggle for power between two world-views, the Apollonian and the Faustian, as Richard M. Weaver—in Spenglerian terms —defines the conflict which reached its first great crisis in the Civil War and now rushes towards its next and world crisis.

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Andrew Lytle

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The Lasting South, edited by Louis D. Rubin Jr. and James Jackson Kilpatrick (Regnery, $5.50), is a book of essays on the cultural antagonism between the South and the prevailing statism of Liberal democracy, and on the threat to the South of final extinction before statism’s mass and commonplace mind. The contributors are chiefly from the Eastern seaboard and the lower South. There are a few from the border states and even beyond the region, whose presence focuses attention upon the South as representative of a state of mind within the Christian inheritance, and therefore not restricted to any particular place.

This state of mind is conservative, in the sense that it preserves: Mr. Kilpatrick in “Conservatism and the South” quotes Mr. Lincoln, “adhering to the old and tried, against the new and untried.” But Mr. Lincoln reversed himself in the struggle for power between two world-views, the Apollonian and the Faustian, as Richard M. Weaver—in Spenglerian terms —defines the conflict which reached its first great crisis in the Civil War and now rushes towards its next and world crisis.