Post by max on Aug 12, 2010 10:50:23 GMT -5
As an aside, I am left wondering what we mean by "fluffy agrarianism."
I am aware of some winsome return-to-earth missives that seem to confuse a professor's gardening hobby with the realities of farming for a living and which imagine that anything short of a full-scale political and cultural transformation is adequate. I would agree that anything of that ilk is not only "fluffy" but almost completely irrelevant.
I hope, though, that "fluffy" and "agrarian" are not thought to be synonymous, nor that agrarianism advocates that urban life and technology be abandoned. The term "agrarian," I know, does nothing to dispel that impression. Accurately, though, agrarianism is simply a producerism that posits that the very most basic and necessary form of production and the foundation of economy must be agricultural, which hardly seems disputable.
Agrarianism does NOT argue that agriculture is the ONLY legitimate form of production or the only element of a healthy and humane economy, or even that derivative professions (like my own) are unimportant. The homegrown American breed of distributism, descended from Jefferson and peaking in the late 19th century with the Populist movement (before sacrificing itself on the Democratic party's cross of silver) is the template for agrarianism (also then known as "producerism"), and there was nothing fluffy about it.
At any rate, I think it's worth being very cautious and circumspect in our criticism of potential allies and sources of wisdom.
I am aware of some winsome return-to-earth missives that seem to confuse a professor's gardening hobby with the realities of farming for a living and which imagine that anything short of a full-scale political and cultural transformation is adequate. I would agree that anything of that ilk is not only "fluffy" but almost completely irrelevant.
I hope, though, that "fluffy" and "agrarian" are not thought to be synonymous, nor that agrarianism advocates that urban life and technology be abandoned. The term "agrarian," I know, does nothing to dispel that impression. Accurately, though, agrarianism is simply a producerism that posits that the very most basic and necessary form of production and the foundation of economy must be agricultural, which hardly seems disputable.
Agrarianism does NOT argue that agriculture is the ONLY legitimate form of production or the only element of a healthy and humane economy, or even that derivative professions (like my own) are unimportant. The homegrown American breed of distributism, descended from Jefferson and peaking in the late 19th century with the Populist movement (before sacrificing itself on the Democratic party's cross of silver) is the template for agrarianism (also then known as "producerism"), and there was nothing fluffy about it.
At any rate, I think it's worth being very cautious and circumspect in our criticism of potential allies and sources of wisdom.