AGRARIANISM

Agrarianism may be defined as the view that the practices of the agricultural life, and the types of technology on which that life has historically been based, are particularly effective in promoting various important personal, social, and political goods. The precise character of these goods—and the respective roles of science, technology, government, society, and individuals in procuring them—varies according to which thinker or stream of agrarian thought one wishes to consider. Two different sources of modern agrarian thinking will be considered here: (1) the agrarianism of the "Old Whig," anti-federalist American founders, itself a self-conscious effort to retrieve the agrarian and republican values of the classical world; and (2) the agrarianism promoted by antimodern thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A third stream of agrarian thought and practice may be found among dissenting religious groups such as the Amish and other Anabaptist sects. However, with the exception of their theologically-grounded suspicion of scientific inquiry, these religious groups' ethical critique of science and technology is more fully articulated by the antimodern agrarians. Indeed, the antimodern agrarians' political-ethical critique of modern science and technology, though not especially well known, is one of the more original to have emerged in the last century and is arguably becoming more influential.

From Old Whig to Antimodern Agrarianism

As every schoolchild knows, Thomas Jefferson contended for an agrarian vision of America. As unsystematic in his approach to this subject as he was to most others, Jefferson scattered his brief observations about the value of the agricultural life throughout his letters and other documents. Most famously, in query XIX of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781–1782), Jefferson argued that agriculturalists were especially apt to be virtuous: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. ... Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example." By virtue, Jefferson and most of the other anti-federalists had foremost in mind a certain spirit of self-reliance that made economic—and therefore genuine political—independence possible. Yeoman farming was the indispensable support of republican government.

Jefferson was a reliable spokesman for republican agrarianism, but its most penetrating theorist was probably John Taylor of Caroline (1753–1824), a leading Virginia planter whose agrarian treatise Arator was first published as a series of newspaper articles in 1803. Much of the book consists of Taylor's practical suggestions, based on his own analysis, observation, and experiments, for improving American agriculture (eight numbers alone are devoted to Taylor's thoughts on the topic of "manuring"), the condition of which he lamented ("Let us boldly face the fact. Our country is nearly ruined").

Taylor's defense of republican agrarianism rests on much the same ground as Jefferson's. Political independence, Taylor agrees with Jefferson, cannot be secured by "bankers and capitalists." But not only does he place more emphasis than does Jefferson on the role of agriculture as "the mother of wealth" as well as "the guardian of liberty," he goes further in articulating the personal benefits afforded by life on the land. Farming, he maintains, brings more pleasure than other modes of employment. It provides continual novelty and challenges to the mind. It meets the physical needs of the body. It promotes the virtue of liberality and rewards almost every other virtue. It is an aid in the quest for eternal life, for it feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and gives drink to the thirsty. And because it is a vocation inevitably more concerned with practical affairs than abstract speculations, it is the "best architect of a complete man." Virtually every claim for the farming life to be made by agrarian thinkers in the following centuries is anticipated here.

As M. E. Bradford points out in his introduction to a 1977 reissue of Arator, Taylor, Jefferson, and their fellow Old Whigs, such as Edmund Ruffin (1794–1865), quite consciously saw themselves as retrieving the classical agrarian tradition represented by figures such as Hesiod (c. 600 b.c.e., in Works and Days), Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 b.c.e., in De Agri Cultura), Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 b.c.e., in Re Rustica), and Virgil (70–19 b.c.e., in Georgics). Such figures were, like the Old Whigs, concerned with the relationship between politics and farming, and they therefore also tended to celebrate the personal and civic virtues associated with farming—economic independence, willingness to engage in hard work, rural sturdiness, hatred of tyranny—that the Old Whig founders saw themselves as protecting through the American Revolution.

The celebration of the farmer's life in America at the time of the founding of the nation was not limited to southern Republicans. One must note, for instance,
J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782). But the approach of someone such as Crèvecoeur (or, in the nineteenth century, writers such as Donald Grant Mitchell [1822–1908]) is that of the pastoral—which is to say, the use of farming principally as a literary device or metaphor for the exploration of other themes. In Crèvecoeur's case, this would include the nature of Nature, with a capital and Rousseauean N. Letters from an American Farmer is thus a literary more than an agrarian classic, and philosophically Crèvecoeur is more nearly a forerunner of later environmentalists than he is of the agrarians, who typically display a more profound awareness than he of the imperfectability of the human and natural world.

Although republican agrarianism would continue to permeate American politics and literature for many years—and indeed, continues to find resonance in contemporary works such as Victor Davis Hanson's influential The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1995)—by the mid- to late-1800s defenses of agrarian ways had become entangled with populist politics and as such were less explicitly focused on the goods of the farming life per se than on the interests of farmers. But with the closing of the North American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, and with the concomitant slow decline in the number of Americans living on farms (the U.S. farm population began to decrease as a proportion of the whole after 1917), a new generation of self-consciously agrarian thinkers began to emerge. These included the American economist Ralph Borsodi (1888–1977), the founder of the Country Life movement Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954), and the Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman (1897–1983), all of whom—along with several others—are profiled in Allan Carlson's indispensable history, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (2000).

As Carlson shows, this group heralds the advent of a new and distinct type of agrarianism. Although its proponents' political affiliations varied widely (some were radical progressives, some liberals, some conservatives, and at least one a self-described reactionary), they all shared a deep dissatisfaction with many aspects of modern economic, political, social, and religious structures. The urbanized, mass consumerism of industrial society had come into focus for them as a characteristic feature of modernity in a way that it could not have for the earlier republican agrarians. Some form of resistance to modernity, some alternative, was therefore needed.

The men and women associated with the so-called Southern Agrarians arguably constituted the most important group of antimodern agrarian thinkers. Their manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, was published in 1930. An oft-overlooked sequel, Who Owns America? (which also featured contributions from prominent English distributists like Hilaire Belloc [1870–1953] and Douglas Jerrold [1803–1857]), appeared six years later. The leaders of the Southern Agrarians—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Donald Davidson (1893–1968), Allen Tate (1899–1979), and Andrew Nelson Lytle (1902–1995)—would continue to develop agrarian themes and arguments for some years, although Ransom bowed out of the struggle earlier than the others. While they shared the republican concerns of their southern forebears Jefferson and Taylor, they also charged modern industrialism with promoting irreligion, extinguishing great art and high culture, degrading the quality of human relations, and, not least, destroying the old rural, aristocratic southern culture they preferred to the industrial culture of the North.

The Southern Agrarians hoped to spark a "national agrarian movement," in Ransom's words. In this they failed spectacularly, but they did leave behind some successors, most notably the University of Chicago rhetoric professor Richard M. Weaver, the literary critic and American founding scholar M. E. Bradford, and the novelist, essayist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry, unquestionably North America's leading contemporary agrarian writer.

Although Berry belongs to some extent to the Southern Agrarian tradition, his agrarianism has several other sources, as well. He represents the agrarianism associated with radical and progressive movements—the mid-century "Back to the Land" movement, the ecoagrarianism loosely associated with the postwar counterculture (Berry has been active, for instance, in antinuclear efforts), and the movement toward green or organic farming and against agribusiness and genetically modified foods. In Berry the common ground held by all of these sources of modern agrarian discontent becomes clear.

Agrarians, Science, and Technology

Agrarianism, in its republican version, was generally associated with a positive view of the ability of science and technology to aid agriculture in its effort to bring about a wealthier and more comfortable existence. "If this eulogy should succeed in awakening the attention of men of science to a skilful practice of agriculture," wrote Taylor of his Arator, "they will become models for individuals, and guardians for national happiness." Classical in inspiration, even the practical Taylor's republican agrarianism conformed to the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Indeed, even the antimodern agrarianism of people such as Borsodi and Bailey, who were more concerned with the urbanization and centralization of modern life than they were with its secularization and the cultural ascendance and authority of science, represented a version of Enlightenment rationalism. But a few agrarians developed rather sophisticated and original critiques of scientific rationality and technological society. Most worthy of mention in this regard are Ransom, Tate, and Berry. For them, mass technological-industrial society was the consequence and analog of the scientific mode of thinking.

Some of Ransom's best work on this subject is included in his first two books, God Without Thunder (1930) and The World's Body (1938), in which he argued that reality does not inhere in the abstract, universal laws proposed by science as a way of "explaining" all phenomena, but rather in concrete, particular objects. These particular objects cannot be known as particulars via scientific reason, because science depends on the method of abstraction, which sees a particular only as an instance of a more universal category. A poetic or aesthetic approach, by contrast, does justice to the world by attempting to create a vision of the whole of reality with all its messy and mysterious particularity. In Ransom's historiography, the world had moved first from the perceptual (or premodern) "moment," thence to the "conceptual/scientific," and finally must now progress to the "aesthetic."

Tate makes a similar argument in "Remarks on the Southern Religion," first published in I'll Take My Stand. Where Ransom posits poetry or the aesthetic mind as conserving the "whole" object (or, in his vocabulary, "the world's body") for consideration, Tate posits a religious approach as the antithesis of abstraction. Modern science, writes Tate, reduces objects to those qualities they share with other objects of the same type, and to what they can do or how they work—"the American religion" to which the southern religion of his title is opposed. For Tate, an obsessively quantitative way of seeing the world had become characteristic of the modern Western mind.

Among agrarians, Berry has articulated the most radical critique of scientific rationality and technological progress. Like Ransom and Tate, he defends the validity of a particularist epistemology and maintains that only a limited portion of the truth of experience can be known by the reductionist methods of science. His ethical critique of modern society rests, like his epistemological critique, on the argument that mass technological industrialism collaborates with science to enshrine a view of human beings and the natural world that treats objects and people as essentially interchangeable. Such arguments can be found throughout Berry's corpus, but they are brought together most systematically in his Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), which attacks the scientism promoted by E. O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). The skepticism displayed by Ransom, Tate, and Berry with regard to the truth claims of science has obvious resonances with postmodern thought while resisting temptations to indulge in relativism.

Agrarianism Outside America

It is difficult to generalize about the relationship between agrarianism and science and technology as that relationship has taken shape outside the North American context. Often, the so-called agrarian social movements of Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe have been allied with, or inspired by, anarchist or Marxist revolutionary ideologies (for example, most repulsively, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge). In the case of Marxist or neo-Marxist agrarians, their accompanying attitudes toward scientific rationality have hardly been similar to those of the antimodern agrarians.

Yet few non-American thinkers or activists commonly associated with agrarianism seem especially worthy of mention. Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921) was beloved by many on the American left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including radical agrarian-oriented writers such as Dorothy Day (1897–1980), who saw Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy as promoting essentially the same sociopolitical vision espoused by the English distributists. Both groups advocated the decentralization of economic power and associated agrarian ideals of one kind or other. But by and large these Russian and British thinkers did not share deeply in nor anticipate the kind of antimodern critiques of science and technology discussed above. Kropotkin was in fact a scientist, an accomplished geographer whose anarchism was at least in part the consequence of his scientific view that the natural, animal, and social worlds were not inevitably grounded in the law of competition, as the Darwinists (social and otherwise) taught, but cooperation and mutual aid. And neither G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) nor Belloc, though certainly not philosophical "modernists," was as skeptical of the epistemological power of discursive rationality as were antimodern American agrarians such as Ransom or Berry. Frankly, the social philosophies of the English distributists and Russian anarchists were too broad and diffuse to be called properly "agrarian," although they certainly had agrarian components. The same could probably be said of Mohandas Gandhi (whose agrarian views were much inspired by Tolstoy).

In his specifically agricultural writings, there may be no one whom Berry cites more frequently than Sir Albert Howard, the English scientist whose An Agricultural Testament (1940), which was chiefly concerned with the rehabilitation of soil fertility, played an important role in creating the organic farming movement. The new agricultural science—and, hence, agriculture—promoted by Howard and those he influenced, including the American organic gardening/farming pioneer J. I. Rodale (1898–1971) and The Land Institute founder and director Wes Jackson, may possibly be considered as constituting yet another stream of agrarian thought.

But note that this tradition of agricultural thought does not concern itself so much with the larger philosophical question of how agrarian practices and culture contribute to the good life, as with attempting to deepen our understanding of what kind of farming techniques are truly sound, arguing on a scientific basis that, for instance, small, family-owned and -operated organic farms are more practical in the long run. There tends to be a confluence between it and antimodern agrarianism because it tends to reject the scientific specialization characteristic of the modern West, and especially its close relationship to industrialism. Although Berry, for one, has clearly been heavily influenced by this tradition, he is typically much more skeptical of the epistemological sufficiency of science and the social beneficence of technology than are the representatives of scientific agrarianism.

Conclusion

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in North America and Europe at least, political radicals and progressives are most usually identified with resistance to the large-scale agriculture embodied by contemporary agribusiness and the technological triumph it symbolizes: think, for instance, of Theodor Shanin's work in peasant studies or José Bové, the southern French farmer and activist famous for his attacks on McDonald's and the globalization of the food market generally. However, the fact that Berry's work has registered appeal across the political spectrum indicates that concern for the fate of the independent farmer and the land of which he is the steward continues to draw on popular agrarian ideals. Thus, to the modern republican agrarian, agribusiness represents the application of commercial and industrial techniques to farming. And to the antimodern agrarian, genetic engineering represents a misplaced faith in the beneficence of technological experimentation. It seems likely that the intellectual future of agrarianism lies in the success with which it is able to put forth a political and ethical philosophy that grounds such arguments convincingly, a task all the more difficult in a profoundly non-agrarian culture.

JEREMY BEER

SEE ALSO Agricultural Ethics;Jefferson, Thomas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Wendell. (1977). The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Without question, the most important agrarian work to be published in America during the last half of the twentieth century.

Berry, Wendell. (2002). The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. A well-selected collection of Berry's most important essays on agricultural themes.

Carlson, Allan. (2000). The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Essential volume includes profiles of largely forgotten antimodern agrarians such as Father Luigi Ligutti, Frank Owsley, Troy Cauley, and Herbert Agar.

Freyfogle, Eric T., ed. (2001). The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life. Washington, DC: Island Press. Fine collection of essays by contemporary agrarian writers, including Gene Logsdon, Scott Russell Sanders, and David Kline, made all the more valuable by Freyfogle's learned and informative introduction.

Malvasi, Mark G. (1997). The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Best book-length explication of the ideas of these three most important Southern Agrarians.

Shi, David E. (1985). The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Highly regarded intellectual history provides a broader context for the consideration of American agrarian thought.

Smith, Kimberly K. (2003). Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Only monograph to date to explore Berry's social and political thought; contains an excellent sketch of the intertwined histories of environmentalism and agrarianism in America.

Taylor, John. (1977). Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political: In Sixty-Four Numbers, ed.
M. E. Bradford. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Taylor, more than Jefferson, is the representative republican agrarian of the post-revolutionary period.

Twelve Southerners. (1930). I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. New York: Harper & Brothers. The antimodern agrarian touchstone, suffused with intelligence, still proves inspiring to agrarians and irritating to critics.