[2][3] They sought to confront the widespread and rapidly increasing effects of modernity, urbanism, and industrialism on American (but especially Southern) culture and tradition.
The Agrarians were influenced by the medievalism of Victorian writers Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris, as well as the French right-wing tradition that began with Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Joseph de Maistre, which they accessed through the writings of contemporaries T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and Charles Maurras.
[6][7][8] A key quote from the "Introduction: A Statement of Principles" to their 1930 book I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition: All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.
[13] Scholar Louis Menand has identified many of their contributions as influential in spreading the idea of New Criticism to the United States from Britain.
The sociologists produced Rupert Vance's The Human Geography of the South (1932), and Odum's Southern Regions of the United States (1936), as well as numerous articles in the journal Social Forces.
"In this context," writes Paul V. Murphy, "the Agrarian image of a better antebellum South came to represent for Warren a potential source of spiritual revitalization.
"[16] It was Warren's concern with democracy, regionalism, personal liberty and individual responsibility that led him to support the civil rights movement, which he depicted in his nonfiction works Segregation (1956) and Who Speaks for the Negro?
"[16] Louis D. Rubin Jr. assessed the Agrarians in 1979:In retrospect the importance of I'll Take My Stand lay in its vigorous reaffirmation of religious humanism and its farseeing critique of the abuses of unchecked industrial exploitation.
In certain crucial respects it is far closer in spirit and intent to works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" in its rebuke to an acquisitive business society.
[12]In 1981, University of Georgia Press published Why the South Will Survive: Fifteen Southerners Look at Their Region a Half Century after I'll Take My Stand, with contributions from Donald L. Anderson (1932–2004),[20] M. E. Bradford, Cleanth Brooks, Thomas Fleming, Samuel T. Francis, George Garrett, William C. Havard, Hamilton C. Horton Jr., Thomas H. Landess, Marion Montgomery, John Shelton Reed, George C. Rogers Jr., David B. Sentelle, and Clyde N. Wilson, with an afterword by Lytle.
[21] In recent decades, some American traditional conservatives such as Allan C. Carlson, Joseph Scotchie, and Eugene Genovese have praised the Agrarian themes in light of what they see as the failures of highly urbanized and industrialized modern societies.
[citation needed] Some of their social, economic, and political ideas have been refined and updated by writers such as Allan C. Carlson and Wendell Berry.