In his introduction to Agrarianism in American Literature, M. Thomas Inge defines "agrarianism" by the following basic tenets:
Cultivation of the soil "has within it a positive spiritual good" and from it the cultivator acquires the virtues of "honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality." These result from a direct contact with nature, and through nature a closer relationship to God. The agrarian is blessed in that he follows the example of God in creating order out of chaos.
Farming is the sole occupation which offers total independence and self-sufficiency.
The farmer has a solid, stable position in the world order. He "has a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which are psychologically and culturally beneficial." The harmony of his life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society.
Urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy independence and dignity while fostering vice and weakness.
The agricultural community, with its fellowship of labor and cooperation is the model society.
Agrarianism is not identical with the back to the earth movement, but it can be helpful to think of it in those terms. The agrarian philosophy is not to get people to reject progress, but rather to concentrate on the fundamental goods of the earth, communities of limited economic and political scale, and simple living--even when this involves questioning the "progressive" character of some recent social and economic developments.
In the 1910s and 1920s, agrarianism garnered significant popular attention, but was eclipsed in the industrial boom of the postwar period. It revived somewhat in conjunction with the 1960s environmentalist movement, and has been drawing an increasing number of adherents.
Recent agrarian thinkers are sometimes referred to as neo-Agrarian.
Agrarian folk appear as a negative mirror image of all that is urban, industrial, and modern; not as makers of history, but rather as a inhabitants of history, endowed with mentalities and memories which can be recovered, but not with creative powers to transform their world.
Agrarian history appeared first as a chronicle of state policy, whose impact was measured in the endless dance of numbers on agrarian taxation, rent, debt, cropping, output, living standards, technology, demography, land holding, contracts, marketing, and other money matters.
The flood, the famine, the drought, the plague, and all the big events in agrarian life are always connected culturally and experientially to the nature of the harvest and to human entitlements to the fruit of the land.
Cutting across all four of the movements mentioned, contemporary agrarian populism shares many of the same elements of this broadly construed "industrialization" critique, in, for example, its concern with corporate power, the role of big science in agro-industrialization, and the implicit links between the social organization of farming and ecological outcomes.
After the so-called closing of the frontier, agrarianism was revitalized during the populist moment of the 1890s, when western farmers fought the monopoly power of the railroads and middlemen.
Agrarianism saw another resurgence after the dust bowl tragedy of the 1930s, when the dust storms were attributed to agricultural consolidation and mechanization, which had pushed poor tenant farmers west to become "sodbusters" (Worster 1979).
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