Suchergebnisse

The title of my paper, I hasten to say, is intended to be noncommittal. It does not mean that there has been a marriage between agrarianism and politics, or even anything approaching a love affair. Yet perhaps this explanation is superfluous. It is obvious that there is not a close working-relationship between current politics and the theory of agrarianism. That condition is the subject of my discussion. The politics of agrarianism has not been denned or has been poorly defined. This paper is simply an attempt to locate the source of the difficulty.

Abstract Sociological studies indicate that adherence to the tenets of agrarianism is still widespread in American society. But efforts to identify the structural roots of agrarianism have been only partially successful in that only a small portion of the variation in support of agrarianism can be explained thereby. The multidimensionality of agrarian beliefs and the linkages with underlying values prevalent in American society are explored with data drawn from a national sample of adults. Results indicate that tenets of the agrarian creed are widely endorsed by the American public as a whole. Moreover, beliefs are organized in the form of attitudinal (factor) dimensions corresponding to four of the five tenets of agrarianism identified by Flinn and Johnson (1974): family farm, agrarian fundamentalism, yeomanship (independence), and farm life style. The analysis of scale scores for the first three dimensions indicates that each expresses a different social ethic that is revealed in the unique configuration of American values to which it is significantly related.

This article analyses Adalberto Tejeda's agrarian experiment
in the state
of Veracruz, Mexico, during the years 1928–32. This experiment was
unique in
two respects. First, disregarding the central government's policy,
which sought
to end agrarian distribution completely, it parcelled out land to the peasants
on
an unprecedented scale; secondly, it proved, contrary to the prevailing
wisdom
of the time, that agrarian reform implemented through the full range of
channels
offered by the 1917 federal constitution could serve as a tool of social
justice and
equality, and hence as a central factor in the advancement of social welfare
and
democracy in Mexico. This article seeks to show that the failure of the
Veracruz
experiment offers an explanation – perhaps a cardinal explanation
– for the
perceived failure of Mexican agrarian reform in general.

The agricultural sector of Israel's Jewish population is not very large; nevertheless the role of agriculture in the political life of the country is of the utmost importance. Seven of the sixteen members of the present cabinet (July, 1956) are members of kibbutzim (collective agricultural settlements). Twenty-six of the seventy-five Jewish members who support the government coalition in the 120-member Knesset (Israel Parliament) are members of kibbutzim or of moshvei-ovdim (co-operative agricultural settlements). David Ben-Gurion, Israel's outstanding leader, who is the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, retains his affiliation with a kibbutz and declares himself to be an agricultural labourer. Recently, for example, he relinquished all his official positions and left for a year and a half to do agricultural work in a kibbutz in Israel's pioneering frontier area, the Negev. The Minister of Finance, the Director General of the Ministry of Defence, and the Secretary General of the Histadrut (Federation of Labour)–three of Israel's key positions–consider themselves members of kibbutzim and take pride in their past as agricultural labourers. The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, a most popular figure with the youth of the country, was born and raised in a co-operative agricultural settlement, and his father, himself a farmer, is a member of the Knesset.