Agrarianism

Agrarianism is a social philosophy or political philosophy which values rural society as superior to urban society, the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values.[1] It stresses the superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed to the complexity of city life.

Philosophy

M. Thomas Inge defines agrarianism by the following basic tenets:[2]

History

The philosophical roots of agrarianism include European and Chinese philosophers. The Chinese school of Agriculturalism (农家/農家) was a philosophy that advocated peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism. In societies influenced by Confucianism, the farmer was considered an esteemed productive member of society, but merchants who made money were looked down upon.[3] That influenced European intellectuals like François Quesnay, an avid Confucianist and advocate of China's agrarian policies, in forming the French agrarian philosophy of physiocracy.[4] The physiocrats, along with the ideas of John Locke and the Romantic Era, formed the basis of modern European and American agrarianism.

United States president (1801–1809) Thomas Jefferson was a representative agrarian who built Jeffersonian democracy around the notion that farmers are “the most valuable citizens” and the truest republicans.[5]

Agrarian parties

Peasant parties first appeared across Eastern Europe between 1860 and 1910, when commercialized agriculture and world market forces disrupted traditional rural society, and the railway and growing literacy facilitated the work of roving organizers. Agrarian parties advocated land reforms to redistribute land on large estates among those who work it. They also wanted village cooperatives to keep the profit from crop sales in local hands and credit institutions to underwrite needed improvements. Many peasant parties were also nationalist parties because peasants often worked their land for the benefit of landlords of different ethnicity.

Peasant parties rarely had any power before World War I but some became influential in the interwar era, especially in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. For a while, in the 1920s and the 1930s, there was a Green International (International Agrarian Bureau) based on the peasant parties in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Serbia. It functioned primarily as an information center that spread the ideas of agrarianism and combating socialism on the left and landlords on the right and never launched any significant activities.

Africa

Tunisia


The Farmers' Voice Party won a seat in the district of Jendouba after the parliamentary election of 2014.[6]

Europe

Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS) was organized in 1899 to resist taxes and build cooperatives. BZNS came to power in 1919 and introduced many economic, social, and legal reforms. However, conservative forces crushed BZNS in a 1923 coup and assassinated its leader, Aleksandar Stamboliyski (1879–1923). BZNS was made into a communist puppet group until 1989, when it reorganized as a genuine party.

Czechoslovakia

In Czechoslovakia, the Republican Party of Agricultural and Smallholder People often shared power in parliament as a partner in the five-party pětka coalition. The party's leader, Antonin Svehla (1873–1933), was prime minister several times. It was consistently the strongest party, forming and dominating coalitions. It moved beyond its original agrarian base to reach middle-class voters.The party was banned by the National Front after the Second World War.[7]

France

In France, the Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition party is a moderate conservative, agrarianist party, reaching a peak of 4,23% in the French presidential election, 2002. It would later on become affiliated to France's main conservative party, Union for a Popular Movement.

Ireland

In the late 19th century, the Irish National Land League aimed to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The "Land War" of 1878–1909 led to the Irish Land Acts, ending such iniquities as absentee landlords, ground rent and redistributing land among peasant farmers.

Post-independence, the Farmers' Party operated in the Irish Free State from 1922, folding into the National Centre Party in 1932. It was mostly supported by wealthy farmers in the east of Ireland.

Clann na Talmhan (Family of the Land; also called the National Agricultural Party) were founded in 1938. They focused more on the poor smallholders of the west, supporting land reclamation, afforestation, social democracy and rates reform. They formed part of the governing coalition of the Government of the 13th Dáil and Government of the 15th Dáil. Economic improvement in the 1960s saw farmers vote for other party and Clann na Talmhan disbanded in 1965.

Latvia

In Latvia, the Union of Greens and Farmers is supportive of traditional small farms and perceives them as more environmentally friendly than large-scale farming: Nature is threatened by development, while small farms are threatened by large industrial-scale farms.

Lithuania

In Lithuania, as of 2017, the government is led by the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union, under the leadership of industrial farmer Ramūnas Karbauskis.

Poland

In Poland, the Polish People's Party traces its tradition to an agrarian party in Austro-Hungarian-controlled Galician Poland. After the fall of a communist regime, PPP biggest success came in 1993 elections, where it won 132 out of 460 parliamentary seats. Since then, PPP's support steadly declines.

Romania

In Romania, older parties from Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia merged to become the National Peasants' Party in 1926. Iuliu Maniu (1873–1953) was a prime minister with an agrarian cabinet from 1928–1930 and briefly in 1932–1933, but the Great Depression made proposed reforms impossible. The communist regime dissolved the party in 1947, but it reformed in 1989 after they fell from power.

The reformed party, which also incorporated elements of Christian democracy in its ideology, governed Romania as part of the Romanian Democratic Convention between 1996–2000.

Serbia

In Serbia, Nikola Pašić (1845–1926) and his People's Radical Party dominated Serbian politics after 1903. The party also monopolized power in Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1929. During the dictatorship of the 1930s, the prime minister was from that party.

Ukraine

In Ukraine, the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko has promised to purify the country of oligarchs "with a pitchfork".[8] The party advocates a number of traditional left-wing positions (lower salary taxes, a ban on agricultural land sale and eliminating the illegal land market, a tenfold increase in budget spending on health, setting up primary health centres in every village [9]), and mixes them with strong nationalist sentiments.[10]

Oceania

Australia

Historian F.K. Crowley finds that:

Australian farmers and their spokesman have always considered that life on the land is inherently more virtuous, as well as more healthy, more important and more productive, than life in the towns and cities....The farmers complained that something was wrong with an electoral system which produced parliamentarians who spent money beautifying vampire-cities instead of developing the interior.[11]

The National Party of Australia (formerly called the Country Party), from the 1920s to the 1970s, promulgated its version of agrarianism, which it called "countrymindedness". The goal was to enhance the status of the graziers (operators of big sheep ranches) and small farmers and justified subsidies for them.[12]

New Zealand

The New Zealand Liberal Party aggressively promoted agrarianism in its heyday (1891–1912). The landed gentry and aristocracy ruled Britain at this time. New Zealand never had an aristocracy but its wealthy landowners largely controlled politics before 1891. The Liberal Party set out to change that by a policy it called "populism." Richard Seddon had proclaimed the goal as early as 1884: "It is the rich and the poor; it is the wealthy and the landowners against the middle and labouring classes. That, Sir, shows the real political position of New Zealand."[13] The Liberal strategy was to create a large class of small landowning farmers who supported Liberal ideals. The Liberal government also established the basis of the later welfare state such as old age pensions and developed a system for settling industrial disputes, which was accepted by both employers and trade unions. In 1893, it extended voting rights to women, making New Zealand the first country in the world to do so.

To obtain land for farmers, the Liberal government from 1891 to 1911 purchased 3,100,000 acres (1,300,000 ha) of Maori land. The government also purchased 1,300,000 acres (530,000 ha) from large estate holders for subdivision and closer settlement by small farmers. The Advances to Settlers Act (1894) provided low-interest mortgages, and the agriculture department disseminated information on the best farming methods. The Liberals proclaimed success in forging an egalitarian, anti-monopoly land policy. The policy built up support for the Liberal Party in rural North Island electorates. By 1903, the Liberals were so dominant that there was no longer an organized opposition in Parliament.[14][15]

Back-to-the-land movement

Agrarianism is similar to but not identical with the back-to-the-land movement. Agrarianism concentrates on the fundamental goods of the earth, on communities of more limited economic and political scale than in modern society, and on simple living, even when the shift involves questioning the "progressive" character of some recent social and economic developments. Thus, agrarianism is not industrial farming, with its specialization on products and industrial scale.[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Thompson, Paul. 2010. “Interview Eighteen” in Sustainability Ethics: 5 Questions Ed. Ryne Raffaelle, Wade Robinson, and Evan Selinger. United States: Automatic Press
  2. ↑ M. Thomas Inge, ed. Agrarianism in American Literature (1969), introduction; paraphrased
  3. ↑ Deutsch, Eliot; Ronald Bontekoei (1999). A companion to world philosophies. Wiley Blackwell. p. 183.
  4. ↑ L.A. Maverick, "Chinese Influences upon the Physiocrats," Economic History, 3:54–67 (February 1938),
  5. ↑ Thomas P. Govan, "Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 30#1 (Feb., 1964), pp. 35–47 in JSTOR
  6. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-10-31. Retrieved 2015-06-19. in Arabic
  7. ↑ Sharon Werning Rivera, "Historical cleavages or transition mode? Influences on the emerging party systems in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia." Party Politics (1996) 2#2 : 177-208.
  8. ↑ Ukraine election: What to look for, BBC News (24 October 2014)
  9. ↑ The Communist Party May Be on Its Last Legs, But Social Populism is Still Alive, The Ukrainian Week (23 October 2014)
  10. ↑ "With Stunts and Vigilante Escapades, a Populist Gains Ground in Ukraine". The New York Times.
  11. ↑ F.K. Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents: 1901 – 1939 (1973) pp 77-78.
  12. ↑ Rae Wear, "Countrymindedness Revisited," (Australian Political Science Association, 1990) online edition Archived 2011-07-23 at the Wayback Machine.
  13. ↑ Leslie Lipson (1948). The Politics of Equality: New Zealand's Adventures in Democracy. U. of Chicago Press.
  14. ↑ James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A history of the New Zealanders (2001) pp. 39–46
  15. ↑ Tom Brooking, "'Busting Up' the Greatest Estate of All: Liberal Maori Land Policy, 1891–1911," New Zealand Journal of History (1992) 26#1 pp. 78–98 online
  16. ↑ Jeffrey Carl Jacob, New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future (Penn State University Press. 1997)

Further reading

Agrarian values

Primary sources

Europe

North America

Global South

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