agrarianism

agrarianism, in social and political philosophy, perspective that stresses the primacy of family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Agrarian ideas are typically justified in terms of how they serve to cultivate moral character and to develop a full and responsible person. Many proponents of agrarianism revere nature (whether understood as natural phenomena or as God’s creation), respect tradition and experience, distrust ideology, and regard science and technology with skepticism. Proponents of agrarianism believe that when individuals attach themselves to farming and a rural way of life, the required labour enhances their existence. Family and locale are rooted, allowing stable associations to develop that enable people to experience, in a nonacquisitive way, the goods of a grounded community, including leisure, friendship, love, art, and religion.

Greek and Roman roots

Agrarianism has strong roots in classical Greece and Rome. As early as the 8th century bce, the Greek poet Hesiod, in his epic Works and Days, forged a link between moral improvement and farming. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce, the Roman orator Marcus Porcius Cato, in his only surviving work, De agri cultura (On Farming), defended the honour of farming, offering moral prescription and wisdom alongside advice on the tilling and managing of land. The Roman poet Virgil’s highly praised Georgics, written in the last century bce and influenced by Hesiod, expresses a love for the countryside and includes instruction in agriculture. The Roman poet Horace, a friend of Virgil and himself the recipient of a farm granted by a benefactor, also praised country life. In his Odes, he revisited the hills and woods of his childhood and set forth the rural life as the means to independence and self-reliance.

Agrarianism in the 18th and 19th centuries

In the modern era, there have been several notable defenses of agrarian themes, particularly in the United States in the decades immediately following the American Revolution. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), the American statesman Thomas Jefferson, who later served as the country’s third president (1801–09), maintained that farming, rather than urban manufacture, would more likely ensure the independence and strength of character necessary for the free citizens of a decentralized republic. In 1782, about the time that Jefferson was composing his Notes, the French American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur published Letters from an American Farmer. According to de Crèvecoeur, the land-owning farmer not only acquires independence and freedom but also personifies the new American. In the early 19th century, the Virginia politician John Taylor defended the Jeffersonian view in The Arator (1813). Taylor decried the use of the law to favour factional and commercial interests, upheld wide property ownership, defended decentralized political power, and advocated rural rather than urban living. For Taylor, as for Jefferson, it was the free farmer whose independence was crucial for citizenship.

Agrarianism in the early 20th century

In the early 20th century, agrarian ideas also found expression in the country life movement led by the American botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey and through the books published by the American writer Ralph Borsodi in the 1920s and ’30s. Defending the family farm and decentralization, Bailey and Borsodi each expressed a confidence in technology and expertise, and each maintained a critical attitude toward traditional religion. On the other hand, in the distributist thought of the English writer and critic G.K. Chesterton, agrarian ideas were wedded to Roman Catholicism. The French-born poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc argued for a wide distribution of property and upheld the importance of the traditional household and local community.

Agrarianism since the mid-20th century

The most notable of the 20th-century agrarians were those of the U.S. South. The Southern Agrarians, a group of 12 American essayists and poets, developed an explicit and resonant defense of their views in I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Among the work’s authors were John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson, who defended a mode of life that they believed was consonant with European rather than industrial society. The Southern Agrarians wrote about a wide range of aspects pertinent to the settled and traditional mode of farm life that they believed was typical of their region—a way of life that contrasted starkly against the then dominant economic doctrines of Keynesianism and corporate capitalism and the intellectual assumptions of humanism and technocratic science. Theirs was a portrait not of the sometimes perversely romanticized “Old South” of plantations and slavery but of the yeoman farmer whose way of life and culture they regarded as threatened by both industrialization and the proponents of purported socioeconomic progress.

Although the version of agrarianism proffered by the Southern Agrarians derived from their experience as Southerners, they maintained that they were expressing universal ideals. In their estimation, a society dominated by science, technology, and industry in a country inclined to favour the urban over the rural population would suffer an impoverishment of manners, art, education, community, and spirit. The family farm and the rhythms of rural life were essential to a good society. Such a life would encourage consonance with nature, discourage the ambitious pursuit of material goods, permit the leisurely enjoyment of family and community, and allow the appreciation and experience of the spiritual and the aesthetic. The property-owning individual, granted an independence of mind and spirit, would nonetheless be attached to a stable community rooted in the traditions and experiences of a locale where culture was part of the larger whole. Although the general philosophy of the Southern Agrarians had little practical import, some of their ideas reverberated in the writings of thinkers as diverse as the American conservative philosopher Richard Weaver and the farmer, essayist, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, who consistently defended the small farm against agribusiness and urban development.

Assessment

In defending a mode of life that emphasizes family, culture, leisure, and manners as well as the historical and contingent particularities of persons and places, agrarianism challenges the notion of progressive industrialization and offers a rebuke to those who seek to reform and remake the provincial and particular. The agrarian suggests that the regional and the traditional contain goods that cannot be replicated by persons focused on acquisition or institutions guided by some ideal of abstract humanity. In this sense, the agrarian counters the advocates of growth and globalization as well as those who defend egalitarian doctrines of democratic capitalism (see social democracy; welfare state).

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Second, agrarians call into question the dominance of corporations. In their view, the corporation separates ownership from control, thereby diminishing the way in which private property has traditionally encouraged and demanded owner responsibility. Some agrarians also criticize the corporation as an artificial creature of the state that has, in their view, secured ever more legal privileges and financial subsidies.

Third, the agrarian perspective revisits questions concerning the commodification of society and the extension of the profit motive into all fields of endeavour. For example, the agrarian shares with certain environmentalists a critique of farming for profit, a wariness regarding the use of technology to control nature, and a strong concern about the factory farming of animals. Finally, agrarians raise important questions about the extent to which governments too often privilege one group or mode of activity over others, perhaps favouring an intellectual elite that seeks to impose its notion of progress on those that it deems backward. Although its proponents’ works are not always systematic, the agrarian vision of independence, decentralization, and tradition raises significant questions about the nature of the good life and poses formidable challenges to modern conceptions of progress, commerce, and politics.