Agrarianism
Agrarianism may be defined as the view that the practices of the agricultural life, and the types of technology on which that life has historically been based, are particularly effective in promoting various important personal, social, and political goods. The precise character of these goods—and the respective roles of science, technology, government, society, and individuals in procuring them—varies according to which thinker or stream of agrarian thought one wishes to consider. Two different sources of modern agrarian thinking will be considered here: (1) the agrarianism of the "Old Whig," anti-federalist American founders, itself a self-conscious effort to retrieve the agrarian and republican values of the classical world; and (2) the agrarianism promoted by antimodern thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A third stream of agrarian thought and practice may be found among dissenting religious groups such as the Amish and other Anabaptist sects. However, with the exception of their theologically-grounded suspicion of scientific inquiry, these religious groups' ethical critique of science and technology is more fully articulated by the antimodern agrarians. Indeed, the antimodern agrarians' political-ethical critique of modern science and technology, though not especially well known, is one of the more original to have emerged in the last century and is arguably becoming more influential.
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