Article ID: CBB748551029

Socrates on the Farm: Agricultural Improvement and Rural Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (2021)

unapi

In many eighteenth-century agricultural texts, peasants were depicted as an impediment to agrarian improvement, superstitious and resistant to novelty. That was the stereotype one often encountered, in any case, in more programmatic writing about agriculture from this period. A closer look at the era's technical literature tells a more complicated story, however. Much as traveling European naturalists relied on local intermediaries in far corners of the globe, elite agricultural improvers back home relied on local rural knowledge as they drafted a new technical literature on farming. This article looks at Jacob Guyer (also known as Kleinjogg), a Swiss farmer who became an enlightened celebrity after the Zurich doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biography of him in 1761. Hirzel called Kleinjogg a “philosophical farmer”; the article explores the implications of this title, and examines the various ways that elite eighteenth-century authors used contact with rural people and direct experience of farming as a source of authority.

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Authors & Contributors
Boyd Hope, Gary
Crothers, A. Glenn
Dyer, Christopher
Glenna, Leland L.
Hünniger, Dominik
Moser, Peter
Journals
Agricultural History
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Economic History Review
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Journal of Historical Geography
Science, Technology, and Human Values
Publishers
Oxford University Press
Ashgate
English Heritage
Presses Universitaires de Louvain
University of South Carolina Press
Springer International Publishing
Concepts
Agriculture
Social class
Technological innovation
Rural history
Knowledge circulation
Science and economics
People
Newton, S. W. A.
Rütiner, Johannes
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
20th century
16th century
17th century
20th century, early
Places
Germany
Switzerland
England
United States
Venice (Italy)
Italy
Institutions
Habsburg, House of
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