by Federico D’Onofrio
In 1920, the agricultural economist and Social-Revolutionary politician, Aleksandr Chayanov published, under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev, The Journey of My Brother Aleksei into the Land of Peasant Utopia. In this science fiction novella, the protagonist falls asleep in Bolshevik Moscow in 1921, later awakening in the fictionally iconic year of 1984. He quickly realizes that the Socialist Revolutionaries, rather than the Bolsheviks, have come to power: under peasant rule, the population of cities has been restricted, science has been harnessed to control the weather, and heavy industry has been dispersed as widely as possible across the countryside. In this narrative fantasy, filled with peasant costumes and futuristic old muzhiki, Chayanov imagined an alternative future in which all the levers of power were held by peasants. For him, peasants were a distinct class, united not only by common interests but also by similar values and ideals, including a shared aesthetic sensibility, reminiscent of the art styles of Breugel the Elder and Russian populist painter Aleksej Venecianov (Brass, 2022; Raskov, 2014).
Chayanov’s works, suppressed by the Soviet regime that ultimately killed their author (executed at Alma-Ata in 1937 after years in Stalin’s camps), were rediscovered in the 1960s through the efforts of historian Basile Kerblay and sociologist Theodore Shanin. This rediscovery became a foundation of critical peasant studies, an anthropological and historical approach—emerging in the context of the Vietnam War—that highlighted the problematic character of rural societies based on a vision of the peasantry as a group, an awkward class, that was not destined to disappear: “They did not have to follow either a capitalist or socialist ‘road’, but could forge a distinct ‘peasant path’ building on family small holdings” (Friedmann, 2018, p. 18). Yet, the post-colonial focus of critical peasant studies and Chayanov’s posthumous prominence within it has, ironically, only obscured how much he actually shared in broader visions of a European agrarian modernity. In particular, the historiography has generally failed to grasp the ideological unity of the kind of agrarianism spearheaded by agricultural economists across continental Europe in the twentieth century. Unlike economic historians, who identified family farms as an engine of rural modernization already in the 1990s, most notably Jan Luiten van Zanden (1991), intellectual historians of agrarian society have long pitted visions of modernity as fully industrialized agriculture—the “Campbell-farm-approach” described by Deborah Fitzgerald (2003)—against inward-looking traditionalism. Only recently, the real significance of European agrarianism as a strategy of conservative modernization extending from the Belle Époque into the 1980s has emerged as a focus in works by Jonathan Harwood (2013) as well as Juri Auderset and Peter Moser (2018).
With the exception of Soviet collectivism, which embraced the industrialization of agriculture, visions of a distinctively rural modernism cut across political regimes and ideologies in the first half of the twentieth century, from German social-democracy to Italian fascism. They originated in a broader historical phenomenon: the rise of agricultural economists as policy experts in Europe and the United States. This form of expertise was a bit similar to, though ultimately distinct from, that of economists and management theorists. Within agricultural studies, beginning already in the late nineteenth century, new professional figures emerged, capable of combining technical-scientific knowledge, mastery of information, and significant political influence.
Agricultural economists, in continental Europe, from Spain to the Baltics, from Scandinavia to Sicily, were part of a broad development of career paths and ideals similar to those of Taylorist engineers (Merkle, 1980). Many of the categories used to analyze the nature of economists’ intervention in politics work equally well for agricultural economists (Eyal and Levy, 2013; Berman and Hirschman, 2018). However, certain characteristics set them apart from similar professional groups. First and foremost is the role that the most prominent agricultural economists assumed as direct representatives of agricultural interests. Ernst Laur, the Bauernkoenig of Switzerland, is a strong example of this. Laur was not only professor of agricultural economics at Zurich’s Federal Polytechnic, which trained generations of Swiss agricultural economists, but also, for over 40 years, he was the leader of the Swiss Farmers’ Union. Additionally, Laur was one of the key inspirers behind the Farmers’ and Citizens’ Party, at the roots of the current Swiss majority far-right party (Baumann, 1993). Laur, that is, combined together international scientific expertise with leadership of a trade organization and decisive political influence on Swiss customs policy. Laur’s case is exceptional for his ability to influence political and scientific life while at the same time representing a paradigmatic case of what other agricultural economists managed to do in neighboring European countries.
The significance of figures such as Laur, and his counterparts in other countries, has not escaped national historiographies. However, historians have so far failed to grasp the international dimension of this phenomenon: the simultaneous emergence in multiple countries of personalities who were both scientific and political actors, capable of harnessing their economic expertise in the service of transforming the countryside. There was a common reason for these similarities: the widespread need to reconfigure agricultural dynamics—markets and enterprises—without provoking social upheaval, avoiding both rural depopulation and challenges to consolidated property structures. Agricultural economists were well suited to envision a new role for agriculture and identify the necessary steps to implement this transformation as concrete policies (Auderset and Moser, 2018; Baumann and Moser, 1999; Di Sandro and Monti, 2020; Schuurman, 2013). In this regard, social science and political action were inextricably linked. The ambiguities underlying ideology—technological progressivism but also social conservativism, praise of entrepreneurship combined with paeans to the idyllic life of the countryside —stemmed from the search for a compromise between industrialization and agriculture, with the latter often conceived as inherently distinct from, and even superior to, industry.
Technically, these agricultural experts sought to recognize the advantages of economies of scale while maintaining a decentralized agricultural production structure: farmers in a world of industry. Scale was necessary for farmers to profit from technological innovations (e.g., hybrid seeds, fertilizers, machines, etc.), but a decentralized structure characterized by a large number of small enterprises and the direct involvement of agricultural entrepreneurs in manual labor. This was seen not only as socially ideal—preventing urban migration and related social concerns—but also as essential for the functioning of a European agrarian economy. Environmental and economic factors rendered neither plantation-style agriculture nor truly industrial agriculture, as developed in the United States or Soviet Union, feasible or desirable.
In order to combine family farming and scale economies, cooperatives and associations played a fundamental role. Through self-organization, farmers could develop their marketing boards for standardized products and buy increasingly costly industrial inputs at lower prices. Cooperatives and associations were meant to level the field with highly concentrated industrial groups (historically, railways, first, and, later, chemical industries, large-scale equipment, food industries, and large-scale retailers), but also to exert an influence on politics comparable to financial and industrial groups or labor unions. This was the essence of continental European agrarianism that the main schools of agricultural economics (not without internal disagreements) theorized in the first half of the twentieth century.
To be sure, this associative dimension extended to the international level (Mignemi, 2017; Graevenitz, 2017). Agricultural economists, like the Scientific Management Movement, maintained intense scientific exchanges and occupied central roles in governmental and non-governmental international organizations that brought together national groups. Again, no better example of this exists than Laur. His Agricultural Accounting Office in Brugg was visited by numerous, leading agricultural economists, including Chayanov, to update their research methodologies and assess the Swiss data collection system (Haumann and Baumann, 1997).[i]
At the same time, Laur was a tireless traveler. From 1896 onward, he participated in the International Congresses of Agriculture—the closest entity to an international agrarian lobby—and represented Switzerland at the General Assemblies of the International Institute of Agriculture, an intergovernmental organization. After World War I, he helped establish a new international agrarian organization that would become the European Confederation of Agriculture in 1948. During the Great Depression, Laur understood, both technically and politically, that agricultural problems could only be resolved through international restructuring of production, that is, eliminating surpluses to safeguard farmers’ incomes without challenging the strategic objectives of European states (D’Onofrio, 2026).
However, in contrast with experts from the British Empire like Frank McDougall, who emphasized complementarities between the different regions of the world (Way, 2013), continental agricultural economists and lobby groups insisted that Europe should not only increase its specialization in high-end products such as meat, dairy, fruits, and wine, but also guarantee a solid base of nationally produced staples (especially cereals). As a result, in anticipation of the protectionist policies of the European Economic Community, little room was left to accommodate the demand of exporting countries from outside Europe or from the European periphery.
Laur and the agrarian movement presented a vision that was radically different—but no less ambitious—than that of the Geneva school of Neoliberalism recently studied by Quinn Slobodian (2018) and others: not globalist—attached to public economic intervention and protectionism—yet not anti-globalist like those figures examined by Tara Zahra (2023). Rather, they sought a conservative reconciliation—an alternative modernity—epitomized by the new rural houses that Laur’s ilk praised in Switzerland: traditional in external appearance, but equipped internally with all the comforts of modern life, such as electricity, washing machines and new cooking technology.
Unlike Chayanov, the majority of agricultural economists of the interwar period were not neo-populists, and had little in common with postwar theorists of peasant life. Behind social-democratic plans for internal colonization, as well as beneath the fascist ruralismo, the true objective of agricultural economists was not really to save old-fashioned peasant life. Rather, their far less romantic task was to enable the dignified integration of agricultural entrepreneurs into industrial society, and to find “happiness in a modernity”—as Sylvain Brunier (2018) notes—guided by technical experts and consultants.
After the Second World War, Europe underwent dramatic social transformation. Agrarian economics itself was confronted with methodological innovations coming from the United States. The sense of a defeat of agrarianism was further intensified by the complete disappearance of one of the most potent contexts of the movement, the Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe. In Soviet-controlled Europe, there was no place for the ideologues of modernized family farming. Yet the legacy of interwar agricultural economics was still visible in the policies of the European Economic Community and strongly resonated in the funding document of the European Common Agricultural Policy.
Today, Europeans still live in a world where meat and dairy products are seemingly abundant, sugar is ubiquitous, white bread is the norm, and fruits and vegetables are available year-round. Yet, Western European farmers have been, for most of the twentieth century, small independent entrepreneurs tightly knit within a network of cooperatives rather than industrial conglomerates. This agricultural system, and its consequences on the environment, was not (only) the result of anonymous market forces, of a seemingly “natural” selection operated by profit, but also of the conscious action of agricultural economists and agrarian leaders. Rediscovering the lasting contribution of agricultural economists to Western European social and political life in the second half of the twentieth century, therefore, is no less important than studying the ideas of Keynesian planners or the roots of Neoliberalism that would eventually submerge that world.
[i] See Werner Baumann and Heiko Haumann, “‘…um die Organisation des typischen Arbeitsbetriebes kennenzulernen.’ : Zu Aleksandr Čajanovs Schrift ‘Bäuerliche Wirtschaft in der Schweiz,’” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte = Revue Suisse d’histoire = Rivista storica svizzera 47 (1997).
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Federico D’Onofrio is Associate Professor of Agricultural History at the University of Vienna and the PI of the ERC project DATAREV: “Leading the first data revolution in European agriculture” (grant number 949722).
Edited By Jacob Saliba.
Featured Image: Aleksej Venecjanov, In the Ploughed Field: Spring (1820s): a seductive image of a truly peasant agriculture, via Wikimedia Commons.
