Agrarianism: An Overview

A Brief Introduction to Agrarianism
by Ryan Setliff

"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar and unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy, is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead."
—George Eliot

In American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, from ISI Books, contributor Jeremy Beer notes:

Agrarianism posits that the practices associated with the agricultural life are particularly—and in some cases uniquely—well-suited to yield important personal, social, and political goods. The precise character of these goods—and the respective roles of government, society, and individuals in procuring them—varies according to which school of agrarian thought one wishes to consider.¹

Jeremy Beer adds this observation:

John Taylor of Caroline, Thomas Jefferson, and their fellow Old Whigs, such as Edmund Ruffin, self-consciously sought to retrieve the classical agrarian tradition represented by Hesiod, Cato the Elder, Varro, and Vergil, who like them were concerned about the relationship between politics and farming. These ancient thinkers celebrated 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 Revolution.²

Agrarian virtues have long been heralded for nurturing the virtues of free citizens—from contemplation to industry to stewardship to thrift. In the introduction to his 1969 book Agrarianism in American Literature, M. Thomas Inge defines agrarianism by the following basic tenets:

• Cultivation of the soil provides direct contact with nature; through the contact with nature the agrarian is blessed with a closer relationship to God. Farming has within it a positive spiritual good; the farmer acquires the virtues of "honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality" and follows the example of God when creating order out of chaos.

• The farmer "has a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which are psychologically and culturally beneficial." The harmony of this life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society which has grown to inhuman scale.

• In contrast, farming offers total independence and self-sufficiency. It has a solid, stable position in the world order. But urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy our independence and dignity while fostering vice and weakness within us. The agricultural community can provide checks and balances against the imbalances of modern society by its fellowship of labor and cooperation with other agrarians, while obeying the rhythms of nature. The agrarian community is the model society for mankind.

Founders as Farmers

Many of the American founding fathers were students of the classics, and recognized the agrarian virtues from experience and classical history. Of the virtues cultivated by farming to its practicioners, James Madison said:

The classes of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more; they are the best basis of public liberty and the strongest bulwark of public safety.

Thomas Jefferson acquiesced, in a 1785 letter to John Jay, noting,

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds.³

Jefferson wrote later in 1797, "Farmers...are the true representatives of the great American interests, and are alone to be relied on for expressing proper American sentiments."

The writings of J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, in his letter "What is an American?" from Letters from an American Farmer (1783) makes the farming life the essence of Americanism:

We are all tillers of the earth... a people of cultivators... united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting laws without dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of an industry unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself." ⁴

His laudatory extol of the civilizing virtues of the labor of small farmers are linked to a larger vision of America's purpose—defined by peace and prosperity, and secured by the labors of husbandmen.

In précis, agrarian virtues nurtured the character in citizens requisite for sustaining republican self-government. Samuel Francis notes:

There was, in short, what historian J.G.A. Pocock calls a "sociology of liberty:" liberty was not merely something that could flourish in a vacuum because everyone wanted it; it blossomed only when and if the citizens were socially independent—if they owned their own property, rule their own families, ran their own farms and businesses, bore their own arms in their own defense, took responsibility for their own failures and mistakes, and earned and enjoyed their own rewards, then and only then could men their own selves, as individuals or as people, as a republic. ⁵

Contemporary Reflections

Russell Kirk recognized the integral nature of localism, regionalism and the vitality of the agrarian life to the maintenance of a healthy, vibrant civil society and republican self-government. He affirmed:

The conservative will do everything in his power to prevent the further dimunition of the rural population; he will recommend decentralization of industry and deconcentration of population; he will seek to keep as many men and women as as possible close to the natural and customary world in which tradition flourishes. This will not be an artificial reaction against a natural process of consolidation, for our intensive industrialization and urbanization, from the days of Hamilton to the Vietnamese War, have been deliberate processes, encouraged by state and national governments and by great corporate bodies. If we were to apply as half as much energy to the preservation of rural life and the old structure of community as we have put to consolidation, we might be as well balanced in these relationships as Switzerland.⁶

For Kirk, the commitment to agrarian ideals was both moral and ethical. It embodies a tacit recognition that in order for life to be fulfilling, it needs to be lived on the humane scale. Besides, communities, family and church do not thrive in the midst of the "cult of colossal," mass society and urban sprawl. As Jefferson opined:

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour.⁷

In the "agrarian republicanism" of the South, writes Professor Forrest McDonald, "virtue, independence, liberty and the ownership of unencumbered real property were inextricably bound together... ownership of land begat indepedence, independence begat virtue, and virtue begat republican liberty." ⁸ Meyer Reinheld acquiesces, "American agrarianism was, like its classical antecedent, politico-etihcal in nature: an agricultural base for the republic with availability of freehold land was deemed by most of the Founding Fathers to be prime safeguard for liberty and stability. The virtuous farmer, the purity and simplicity of his life, were widely invoked, a model conjured up from a classical past simpler than the English and French present." ⁹ The embrace of agrarian ideals in our time does not entail a mere nostalgia for rural life nor an absurd Luddite program for deindustrialization, but rather patterning economic and political life to be most compatible with the human condition. The agrarian ideal can both accept and accommodate natural "progress," but never can it accept "progress" as an end itself—particularly an ill-defined "progress," which comes at the expense of the intangibles in life. Certainly, one can embrace the prescriptive wisdom of the American agrarian inheritance—it's best customs, conventions, and traditions—and yet continue to fully acknowledge the necessity of commerce and industry to modern life.

Essentially, one of the chief values of agrarian thought is the learned wisdom it embodies, regarding the application of the principle of subsidiarity to the body politic. Similarly, agrarian thought embodies an esteem for the independent landholder who values hard work, honesty, frugality, and savings, as opposed to the opportunists who seek and embrace political re-appropriation of the wealth and labor of others through an artificial spoils system of patronage, privilege, graft and corruption. The independent landholder remains the bedrock of republicanism. An old Greek proverb proclaims, "Find an independent income and than find virtue." The acquisition of private property and home ownership has shown itself to be the most advantageous way of producing independent and prosperous citizens. Thus, the agrarian vision runs concomitant with the distributist vision for a widespread distribution of private property.

Moreover, uprooting the dehumanizing aspects of modern mass society and the managerial state entails a rediscovery of localism, rural life, parochial education, and independence. These are the virtues of republican self-government. "Liberty," observes Mark Malvasi, "as the Agrarians understood, is certainly not ours by right. Folly, neglect, and indifference may yet deprive us of its blessings." ¹⁰

• Carlson, Allan. The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (2004)
• Murphy, Paul V. The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (2001)
• Taylor of Caroline, John. Arator. Intro by M.E. Bradford. Softcover: 426 pages. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1977) $10.00.