Agrarian Thought

At Cumberland Books we think that the good life is the simple life. You'll find a more detailed explanation of our thinking in this article.

We don’t promote the premodern agrarian approach to simple, family-centered living as the only path or even the best path to the good life. But it is one of the paths, and so should at least be studied and understood if not embraced. More important, it is the best path we know of at the moment. We won’t argue that everyone should follow the agrarian path—but we will argue that anyone following a different path than agrarianism needs to have carefully and honestly concluded that their path does just as well at avoiding modernity’s pitfalls.

The books on this page are focused on explore agrarianism as a way of life and thought, the whys of agrarian living. For books that explore the practical matters of such a life, see the agrarian practice page.

• The New Agrarian Mind. Allan Carlson's book summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of the different stages of 20th century agrarian thinking. It’s especially good at explaining why the weaknesses (an unjustified faith in education and technology, and a surprising disdain for Christianity) turned out to be fatal.
• The Essential Agrarian Reader. Agrarian thought has made a surprising comeback in the early 21st century. This collection of recent essays provides a good overview of what today's agrarians are thinking, and the successes they are experiencing.
• I'll Take My Stand. Modern folks have a hard time with agrarianism partly because they find it inconceivable that people could have ever lived that way, much less that they could have thrived. This book of twelve essays counters that by describing an agrarianism that was actually lived out in the South, and not so long ago.
• Ideas Have Consequences. Richard Weaver had a deep understanding of the superiority of agrarian over industrial culture. This book is a devastating critique of the latter.
• Henry and the Great Society. This unpretentious little book tells how one man, unwittingly and with the best of intentions, exchanged self-sufficiency and contentment for wage slavery and modern conveniences, in seach of what he thought would be a better life for his family. The results reflect in miniature the grand tragedy of modern industrial society.
• The Soil and Health. Sir Albert Howard founded the organic farming movement. This book is Howard's masterpiece, not only a clear and concise explanation of organic farming but also a profound examination of the agrarian philosphy that insists on such an approach.

• The Little Britches Series. Ralph Moody was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes we experience the pleasures and perils of ranching there early in the twentieth century. Auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms give authentic color to the Little Britches series of books.
• The Little House Series. There are few books we admire more than the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Not only is Wilder an accomplished storyteller, recounting events of her upbringing as the child she was, but her books give the reader an unvarnished, ground-level view of life on the American frontier.
• Eric Sloane. Itinerant sign-painter, meteorologist (and first TV weatherman), prolific member of the Hudson River School of painting, authority on early American rural architecture and farm tools, Sloane wrote and illustrated a treasure trove of books chronicling farm life in post-colonial America.
• Wendell Berry. Novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry is the heir of the Nashville Agrarians, and has devoted himself to championing agrarianism as a true and viable alternative to modern industrial living.
• Janice Holt Giles. Mrs. Giles wrote honest and straightforward stories of country people, both fiction and nonfiction, many of them based in her adopted Appalachian home of Adair County, Kentucky—which is our adopted home as well.

• The Omnivore's Dilemma. A very important book about the state of modern food—how it is produced, how it is marketed, and what eating it does to our bodies and minds.
• Better Off. City-bred Eric Brende was curious to know exactly how much technology was required to live a good life, so he and his new wife spent eighteen months living in a plain community. The story he tells is engaging and insightful.
• The Riddle of Amish Culture. This book treats the Amish as a people who have deliberately and thoughtfully dealt with the encroachments of modern life. The author explains the principles that have led the Amish to make the choices they have made, and in doing so illustrates the powerful and subtle influence of technology on family life, while also showing that its influence can be resisted.
• Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian. A collection of thoughtful essays on agrarianism, modernism, industrial food, boys working together, picking strawberries in the early morning, making hay, growing garlic, plucking chickens, feeling bee energy, the perils of debt, contentment, the family economy, and much more.

• Flee to the Fields. Almost forgotten now is the Catholic Land Movement, a promising twenty-year effort in Britain to help working-class people leave the cities and establish themelves as subsistence farmers. The essays in this volume speak about how they worked towards this goal, and the biblical justification for it.
• An Essay on the Restoration of Property. The philosophical underpinning of the Catholic Land Movement went by the ungainly name of Distributism. This short book by Hilaire Belloc is the clearest explanation and justification of that idea, namely that the good life requires that land ownership be as widely distributed as possible.
• Economics for Helen is Hilaire Belloc's economics primer. We like it especially because it is very skeptical of classic free-market capitalism and offers a non-socialist alternative.