Agrarianism

Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that values agriculture, rural communities, and landholding, often favoring them over urban or industrial society.

Physiocracy: An eighteenth-century economic school that treated agriculture as the source of national wealth. Its claim that land alone generates a net product gave agriculture an unusually central political role.
Yeoman: A small landholding farmer, especially one traditionally regarded as economically independent. The independent yeoman is agrarianism’s recurring model of a citizen grounded in productive property.
Industrialism: An economic and social orientation centered on industrial production and its institutions. Agrarianism commonly criticizes industrial society for concentrating wealth and weakening local livelihoods.
Homestead Act: A United States law enacted in 1862 that offered public land to settlers meeting residency and cultivation requirements. It translated the ideal of widespread family landholding into federal settlement policy.
Agrarian Justice: Thomas Paine’s 1797 proposal for payments to young adults and pensions funded by a tax on inherited land. Paine turned land’s natural common value into a case for publicly funded redistribution.
Thomas Jefferson: American statesman and writer who advocated an independent republic of small landholding farmers. His ideal of the yeoman farmer became a defining American expression of agrarian republicanism.
Subsistence agriculture: Farming that produces primarily to meet the needs of the farmer’s household or community. It illustrates the self-provisioning livelihood that agrarian ideals often contrast with market dependence.
Urbanization: The growth of cities and the increasing share of a population living in urban areas. The rural community valued by agrarianism is often set against expanding urban life.
Populism: A political approach that claims to represent ordinary people against powerful elites. Late nineteenth-century American agrarian movements used populist politics to challenge creditors and railroads.
Southern Agrarians: A group of twelve American writers who published the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand in 1930. They made a prominent literary case against industrial capitalism and for a regional agrarian culture.

Linked from 8 pages