Agrarianism

Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization.^[1]^[2] Adherents of agrarianism tend to value traditional bonds of local community over urban modernity.^[3] Agrarian political parties sometimes aim to support the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society.^[4]

Farming is the sole occupation that offers total and self-sufficiency.

independence

Urban life, , and technology destroy independence and dignity and foster vice and weakness.

capitalism

The agricultural community, with its fellowship of labor and co-operation, is the model society.

The farmer has a solid, stable position in the world order. They have "a sense of identity, a sense of historical and tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which are psychologically and culturally beneficial." The harmony of their life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society.

religious

Cultivation of the soil "has within it a positive good" and from it the cultivator acquires the virtues of "honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality." They result from a direct contact with nature and, through nature, a closer relationship to God. The agrarian is blessed in that they follow the example of God in creating order out of chaos.

spiritual

Some scholars suggest that agrarianism values rural society as superior to urban society and the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values.^[5] It stresses the superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed to the complexity of city life. For example, M. Thomas Inge defines agrarianism by the following basic tenets:^[6]

Back-to-the-land movement[edit]

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.^[64]