Is Distributism Agrarian?

There's not a vast philosophical literature on Distributism. My question in this piece is prompted by an online discussion, not a philosophical journal.¹ I trust, however, that the question is sufficiently interesting in its own right to sustain a philosophical essay. Moreover, it's a question that has been with us for a long time—I suppose for as long as Distributism has been with us (as a matter of explicit doctrine rather than lived experience).² So let's get to it.

First things first: Is Distributism agrarianism? This question has a simple answer: no. The two are not the same thing, even if Distributism is agrarian. There could be an agrarian communist or an agrarian capitalist society.

So what is agrarianism? Let me suggest the following: an agrarian society is one in which agriculture and its practitioners have a determinative influence on society. Agrarianism, then, is the notion that society ought to be agrarian. You can combine this notion with additional motivation—typically, an agrarian will suggest something like this: "Agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society."³ (Why else would you think a society ought to be agrarian?) But you don't need to, and for my purposes, that's not involved in agrarianism, properly speaking.

Agrarianism does not suggest that everyone ought to be a farmer (or otherwise engaged in agricultural pursuits). It doesn't set an arbitrary lower limit on farmers as a percentage of the population or an upper limit on city dwellers. Despite this vagueness, and granting the possibility of borderline cases, we can at least see that the contemporary United States is far from agrarian, while the early United States was strongly agrarian. No doubt, there are agrarian enclaves within the United States to this day—Amish communities, for example, tend to be strongly agrarian (although I understand some Amish are having to move into other lines of work); possibly there are rural communities in Iowa, for example, that would count as agrarian. But they are hardly determinative of the overarching culture of the United States. (Quite the contrary, in fact. It seems plausible to think that due to the ubiquity of pop culture, urban US culture has invaded and largely destroyed whatever was left of traditional rural culture.) But this actually gives a nice example of why I say Distributism is not agrarianism. Plausibly, the Amish are Distributists (practically if not theoretically). Iowa commodity farmers are definitely not, which is not to say they're capitalists either. Lord knows what they are.

My account of agrarianism is more or less modeled on Belloc's account of Distributism. He writes, "When so great a number of families in the State possess Private Property in a sufficient amount as to give its colour to the whole, we speak of 'widely distributed property.'"⁴ Both accounts are somewhat vague, but they do their work.

So my question is whether Distributism demands that enough people become farmers to give a determinative influence to society as a whole. I say yes. I have three arguments.

I

The first is the most straightforward and least convincing to one who denies the conclusion. It is this: those who formalized the notion of Distributism—I deliberately ignore the question of whether, as some of its advocates claim, Distributism just is the application of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and hence ignore the question of whether Distributism predates the great "founding" Distributists—all clearly believed that Distributism is agrarian. The famous expression (linked to Chesterton) "three acres and a cow" makes this fairly plain. Father Vincent McNabb is perfectly more explicit that Catholics ought to be fleeing to the fields.⁵ Belloc's Essay on the Restoration of Property consistently contrasts industrial life with the peasant life—with agricultural life, that is—and laments the fact that "desire for the land and the sense of ownership in it has, for the mass of people, fallen to its lowest."⁶ And, to clinch the case, he writes simply that "the restoration of property means, and has meant throughout history in nearly...