Voices in the Wilderness (The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America) (Book Review‪)‬

The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, by Allan Carlson, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000. 224 pp. AGRARIANISM HAS ALWAYS FOUND a sympathetic place in the hearts of true American conservatives. Many of the American Founders, likewise, acutely aware of classical precedents, preferred the independence and virtue of an agrarian population schooled in pietas to the landless, degenerate mob whose instability and venality came to haunt ancient Rome. Jefferson and Madison looked with dread to the day when America's supply of uninhabited land would be exhausted, and more and more men would be forced to make their livings as mere wage laborers--no longer the proud owners of their own parcel of earth but miserable adjuncts in an impersonal network of economic relationships.