Agrarianism

Agrarianism has two common meanings. The first meaning refers to 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. It stresses the superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed to the complexity of city life, with its banks and factories. The American Thomas Jefferson was a representative agrarian who built Jeffersonian Democracy around the notion that farmers are “the most valuable citizens” and the truest republicans.

The philosophical roots of agrarianism include European and Chinese philosophers. The Chinese School of Agrarianism was a philosophy that advocated peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism. This influenced European intellectuals like François Quesnay, an avid Confucianist and advocate of China's agrarian policies, forming the French agrarian philosophy of Physiocracy. The Physiocrats, along with the ideas of John Locke and the Romantic Era, formed the basis of modern European and American agrarianism.

Secondly, the term "agrarianism" means political proposals for land redistribution, specifically the distribution of land from the rich to the poor or landless. This terminology is common in many countries, and originated from the "Lex Sempronia Agraria" or "agrarian laws" of Rome in 133 BC, imposed by Tiberius Gracchus, that seized public land (ager publicus) used by the rich and distributed it to the poor. This definition of agrarianism is commonly known as “agrarian reform.”

In societies influenced by Confucianism, the farmer was considered an esteemed productive member of society, whereas merchants who made money were looked down upon. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the word identified any land reform movement that sought to redistribute cultivated lands equally. Today, the word has largely shed this radical political meaning. Instead, agrarianism points to a collection of political, philosophical, and literary ideas that together tend to describe farm life in ideal terms.