The word "agrarianism" comes from the Latin lex agraria, an ancient Roman law that called for the equal division of public lands. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the word identified any land reform movement that sought to redistribute cultivated lands equally. Such agitation was a response in part to the eighteenth-century English Enclosure Acts, which disrupted traditional agricultural practices. In the twentieth century the word shed this radical reform definition. In the early twenty-first century agrarianism points to a collection of political, philosophical, and literary ideas that together tend to describe farm life in ideal terms.

Agrarianism finds expression in the literary pastoral tradition, which stretches back to ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Theocritus and Virgil. The pastoral envisions the natural world as an escape from the complexities of urban life. In a rural landscape the character...