Socrates on the Farm

Agricultural Improvement and Rural Knowledge in Eighteenth‐Century Germany and Switzerland

Bibliographic Data

ID11307038
AuthorsDenise Phillips (0000-0002-1054-9422, Department of History The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume44
Issue2
Pages159-179
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBerichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0170-6233 • E-ISSN: 1522-2365
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/bewi.202100003
PMID33900633
OpenAlexW3158206639
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

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

Agrarian society · Agriculture · Archaeology · Art history · Biography · Economic history · Elite · Globe · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology

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