Agrarianism

Agrarianism is a philosophy of society and politics that stresses the primacy of family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. These tenets are typically justified in terms of how they serve to cultivate moral character and to develop the full and responsible person. Many proponents of agrarianism bear a reverent affection toward nature (understood as natural phenomena or as God's creation), respect tradition and experience, distrust ideological systems of thought, and regard skeptically what they perceive as the pretensions of science and technology. By attaching individuals to nature, the agrarian suggests that our labor can enhance life; by bonding individuals to the rooted and stable associations of family and locale, we may experience, in a nonacquisitive [Page 49]way, the goods of a grounded community, including leisure, friendship, love, art, and religion.

Agrarianism has strong roots in classical Greece and Rome. As early as the eighth century BCE, in his Works and Days, Hesiod forged a link between moral improvement and farming. In the third and second centuries BCE, the Roman, Cato the Censor, in his only surviving work, On Agriculture, defended the honor of farming, offering moral prescription and wisdom alongside advice on the tilling and managing of land. 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. Horace, a friend of Virgil, and himself the recipient of a farm granted by a benefactor, also praised the 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.

In the modern era, there have been several notable defenses of agrarian themes. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson 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, J. Hector St. John de Crèvocoeur, a Frenchman who had spent a decade in America, published his Letters From an American Farmer. The land-owning farmer not only acquires independence and freedom but personifies the new American. In the early 19th century, in his book, Arator, John Taylor of Caroline defended the Jeffersonian view. Taylor decried the use of law to favor 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 is the free farmer whose independence is crucial for citizenship.

In the early 20th century, agrarian ideas also found expression in the Country Life movement led by Liberty Hyde Bailey and through the books of Ralph Borsodi, who published in the 1920s and 1930s. 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 G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, one finds the wedding of agrarian ideas to Catholicism. Belloc, for example, argued for a wide distribution of property and upheld the importance of the traditional household and local community.

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