Two and a half undeservedly forgotten conceptual foundations of rural sociology

Abstract

Although Russian society is strongly connected with the countryside and has deep ‘rural roots’, agrarian issues have always been somewhat marginal in the national scientific tradition, mainly in its social-scientific branch. Today the situation seems to change due to at least two globally urgent issues - sustainable food-security patterns (agricultural production) and rural social/human capital - which increase both theoretical and practical interest to the heuristic and reform potential of the rural sociology research. To the acknowledged factors of the somewhat marginal status of rural sociology the authors add the fact that not all its conceptual foundations, especially in the national tradition, were identified and systematized. The article presents only two and a half such foundations: agricultural economics, theories of peasant agrarianism, and, partly, theory of rural-urban continuum (forgotten in its rural half and widely used to explain suburbanization trends). In the first part of the article, the authors reconstruct the historical path of agricultural economics, focusing on its creative adaptation to the specific conditions of rural Russia. At the turn of the 1920s - 1930s, the national and global political-ideological crisis of agricultural economics determined the replacement of its initial German economic-philosophical agrarian approach by the American pragmatic agricultural approach and applied farm management. In the second part of the article, the authors summarize, on the one hand, utopian, political-economic and populist ideas of agrarianism (1); on the other hand, reasons for its fair criticism which did not focus on the utopian ideas of agrarianism (rather on its being an eclectic pragmatic ideology, contradictions between its left and right wings, its negative conservative potential, lack of political experience and decisiveness, and so on). In the third part of the article, the authors reconstruct a more successful life path of the theory of ruralurban continuum, which emphasizes not so much the fundamental differences between rural and urban communities as a spatially extended rural-urban scale of community types differing by size, population density, division of labor, isolation, local solidarity, and so on. This continuum model remains extremely important for the analysis of the social development of contemporary rural areas and should be supplemented by the elements of the theory of peasant economy and cooperation in order to study comprehensively rural social and human capital.