agrarianism 50

Porch readers will be interested in the new online symposium on distributism that is now on ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and 'Things Divine.' This includes…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS A couple of weeks ago some fine intellectuals, political figures, journalists, and activists associated with this blog gathered together to talk about localism,…

Interest in agrarian politics can start in childhood. As feminists used to say, "The personal is political."

The problem is a result of the underlying specialization—not of people but of places—for what could be more specialized than designing a town according to discrete zones designated by use?

Economics has become a totalizing system claiming the power to explain all things. It is as much a religious system—by another name—as is Berry's Great Economy.

Teaching Wendell Berry to students today isn't a thankless task, but the victories are small and far between (which, one might say, is all the best victories always are).

According to David Rieff, FPR occupies an honorable space on the right side of the American commentariat spectrum, in that many of our writers (1) are willing to admit the…

I'll take the old gal with a few well-earned wrinkles that fit soft and snug like a favorite glove. It's the land, stupid, and boy is she a thing of…

Men cut off from their origins and alienated from their selves become desperate, and desperate men do desperate deeds.

I have just returned from one of the most remarkable journeys of my life, a ten day tour of Romania to promote an anthology of distributist and localist essays, Economic…

Patrick Deneen's excellent post this morning on populism, directly invoking Kansas, gives me the occassion to repost a short essay I wrote last year for my on again off again (more off…

Holland, MI. I confess: I hate farms. I hate everything about them. I hate the malodorous smells that take days to wash off. I hate the all-pervasive dirt which invades…

In the late 1970s, my grandfather’s older brother, already in his nineties, was pressing his almost deaf ears to a little portable radio still hoping to hear that “the Americans…

“Hontar:  We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus. Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it.” From The…

This is, at last, the last chapter of my new book, Equity and Equilibrium: The Political Economy of Distributism. I post it here because so many questions have arisen on…

Moorpark, CA.  In October of 1997 I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address, “Hot, Humid, and Sad.”  What I…

Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside.  He observed that…

“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house.  I got up from the wooden bench on which…

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.”  The villagers of Pomatambo, Ayacucho, Peru, did not coin the phrase, though it has captured their lives with eerie precision…

Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning – an imaginative rendering of our…

Claremont, CA. The Big Apple dreams of the organic apple. Everywhere you look in The New York Times these days, somebody is talking about organic farming. A few examples -…

Devon, PA.  Thanks in part to the series of fine essays John Médaille has provided us during the last several weeks, the implicit economic vocabulary on the Front Porch has…

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Before it became a science of supply and demand and the circulation of commodities, economics was originally understood as the wisdom of household management. The Greek word…

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Pope Benedict has recently gained a bit of credit with world media for emphasizing the urgency of addressing the environmental devastation we have wrought. This (combined with…