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Agrarianism is a political and philosophical orientation that emphasizes the pur ported moral virtue, practical wisdom, environmental sustainability, and political usefulness of agricultural pursuits, in particular when such pursuits are practiced by large numbers of people, preferably by their own labor on land they own or who at least exercise some authority over themselves. Many proponents of agrarianism do not embrace all or even most particulars of this orientation, seeing it instead as merely an appropriate label for those who see value in farming and a more rustic or “simple” rural life as opposed to more commercial or urban transactions and lifestyles. However, agrarianism as a broad challenge to various complex forms of economic and political organization has deep roots, extending back centuries to the writings of Roman landowners, as well as having played a particularly important role in developing approaches to modern republican thought in several nations.

Affiliation With Conservatism, Populism, And Localism

By looking at rural living conditions and mostly self-sufficient economies—in particular those maintained by minimal technology and in accordance with traditional family and community practices—as a superior form of social organization, the one best able to inculcate in human beings the moral goods necessary for a fulfilled life, agrarianism seems closely associated with various forms of conservatism. Many of those who have expressed agrarian sentiments in the wake of the Industrial Revolution have consciously, and some very explicitly, presented themselves as conservatives. Agrarianism, in the writings of some, has invoked mostly lost premodern social structures, like the remnants of the feudal order long preserved—despite enclosure laws—in Great Britain, or the yeoman farmer/freeholder ideal treasured by early settlers in the English colonies, an ideal perpetuated in early-nineteenth century America by republican thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Caroline. Other, more recent agrarian thinkers have presented themselves as lamenters of a traditional, regional agrarian way of life lost in the midst of socioeconomic growth and demographic and technological change. This would be the case in the United States of the “Vanderbilt” or “Southern Agrarians,” including poets and authors like John Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Warren, who mourned and, to a degree, raged against the passing of the primarily agricultural “Old South” as President Roosevelt’s responses to the Great Depression (1929–1939), such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, used federal power and dollars to bring industrial work in impoverished parts of the United States.

However, by looking to the capacity of individuals to own, work, and make a sustainable living off of land labored upon by themselves, agrarianism also is closely associated with populist revolts; for example, the People’s or Populist Party in the United States from the 1880s through the early 1900s was overwhelmingly shaped by the hopes and demands of rural voters from the American South, Midwest, and Great Plains. Consequently, the agrarian orientation also may align with certain progressive demands from that era, including greater democratic control over banks, railroads, and other corporate institutions whose decisions greatly affect the ability of farmers to independently decide on their own economic actions. Hence, agrarianism is both radical and reactionary, and it has historically encouraged ambitious reforms aimed at limiting corporate power and distributing land, as well as rhetorical and political approaches to civic life that privilege the countryside, the “heartland,” as more authentic, closer to historical virtues, and thus a better gauge of how people ought to use their freedom.

One common feature of both radical and reactionary ways of speaking of agrarianism, however, is its localism—its belief in the importance of keeping human affairs limited to a scale small enough that local knowledge will be sufficient to address the concerns of daily life. Such localism is usually expressed along with an ant corporate perspective, visible today in the frequent hostility to globalization and free trade felt by those who live in and represent the agricultural sectors of Europe, North America, and East Asia, and in particular to a distrust or at least an ambiguous relationship with agribusinesses and large, often corporate farm and ranch operations. While such industrial farms and feedlots in fact provide the great bulk of the food consumed in industrialized nations around the world, agrarian thinking usually sees the globalization of agriculture as undermining the real value of farming.

Four Aspects Of Modern Agrarian Claims

The specifics of modern agrarian claims usually include several particular elements:

First, morally, farming teaches an economy of limits, patience, shared work, and seasonal dependence, thus schooling those who are raised in agricultural environments in a perspective that will help them deal more respectfully with others, be less demanding and less self-concerned in addressing problems, be more willing to share with others and form associations with them to accomplish goals, be more generous with their time and resources, and remain pious in the face of challenges to their faith.

Second, practically, rural life and agricultural work teach good physical and mental habits and instruct those who devote themselves to—or are at least raised in environments shaped by—farming in a multitude of practical skills that involve animal husbandry, nutrition, construction, and so forth.

Third, environmentally, agrarian occupations teach one about the needs of the planet and about nourishing soil, irrigation, crop rotation, and the like, and as such communicate ideas of stewardship between natural resources and human beings far more thoroughly than can those occupations that have no contact with agriculture, thus leaving those so employed to learn about the natural world through tourism or indirect education at best, or perhaps not at all.

Fourth, politically, being a landowner (the ideal agrarian arrangement) or a farm laborer teaches, through habituation, personal responsibility but also civic humility, keeping the mind focused on practical as opposed to abstract possibilities. It also teaches, through the experience of tending to one’s stewardship and working visibly through the slow cycle of growing food and feeding oneself, independence of mind and an unwillingness to allow one’s economic or social life to be controlled by powers over which the individual has direct say.

Conclusion

The environmental claims made on behalf of the agrarian orientation are for the most part a product of late-twentieth century reflections on the nature of the natural world and the agricultural use of it. The three other sets of claims all have direct antecedents in the writings of Roman agrarians such as Cato the Elder, Cicero, Varro, Virgil, and others, all of whom associated the ownership and operation of a farm (though not, it should be noted, the life of the slaves who did most of the work on said farms) with economic independence, humility, a strong work ethic, physical heartiness, and a determination to resist tyranny. These varying points, echoed down the centuries, have been used in the history of many Western nations to suggest that the task of agricultural work must be preserved for the sake of the moral health, political liberty, and environmental resources of the nation. Jefferson famously claimed that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.” While relatively few advocates of agrarianism today would use Jefferson’s exact words, his sentiments remain prevalent.

Bibliography:

Berry,Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977.
The Art of the Commonplace:The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Edited by Norman Wirzba.Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.
Carlson, Allan. The New Agrarian Mind:The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in 20th-Century America. New Brunswick, N.J.:Transaction, 2000.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Hanson,Victor Davis. The Other Greeks:The Family Farms and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. New York: Free Press, 1995.
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Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand:The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Introduction by Louis D. Rubin Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
Vitek,William, and Wes Jackson, eds. Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1996.