My paper for AESS 2018

“Ancient Agrarianism, Utopian Ecocriticism, and the Genealogy of Democracy"

Guided by current concerns of ecological politics, and in engagement with the work of contemporary agrarian eco-critics such as Gary Nabahan, Vandana Shiva, and Wendell Berry, this paper draws upon archaeological theory to examine the ancient roots of agrarianism as a mode of political critique. Recent discoveries and theoretical insights coming from the field of archaeology are reshaping our understanding of how and why the first states arose. Drawing on the work of archeological theorists Ian Hodder, Norman Yoffee, and Colin Renfrew, I argue that early states, rather than arising from an economic, agricultural basis, were utopian projects whose chief ecological effect was the ruralization of surrounding territories. This ruralized landscape is, therefore, a fundamentally utopian space, yet it is one which stands in a fundamental antagonism to the state that propounds it. On this basis, my paper makes three related claims: first, that critical agrarianism has a more ancient provenance than is usually recognized; second, that for material and historical reasons, agrarianism stands in a particular relationship to the state itself; and third, that democracy can be understood historically as a fundamentally agrarian project. The paper draws upon and engages a variety of historical sources, including classical poets such as Virgil, Theocritus, and Hesiod; the Chinese “School of Tillers” and Confucian agrarian writings, as well as ancient near eastern sources. The argument is also positioned within the secondary literature on the rise of constitutional government in ancient Greece and Rome, including the work of Mark Hanson, Daniel Deudney, Paul Rahe, Joseph Bryant, and Orlando Patterson. My conclusion is that agrarian environmentalism almost always pays too little attention to politics at the fundamental level of the tragedy of state sovereignty—that the state is both a solution and a problem. Agrarian environmentalists, therefore, as well as many advocates of indigenous political ecology, should embrace utopianism, but must also face the fundamental political challenges that have been heretofore faced most fully by radical democrats and anarchists.

Keywords: eco-agrarianism, democracy, the state, anarchism, utopianism