People, Power, Property: On Henri Lefebvre’s “On the Rural”
Henri Lefebvre | On The Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography | eds. Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton; transl. Robert Bononno | University of Minnesota Press | 2022 | 258 Pages
Agronomists study the quality of soil: its water retention, mineral and nutrient content, the presence or absence of chemicals. Every layer of dirt—from organic material at the surface to the subsoil two feet below—offers clues about its formation. In other words, agronomists are historians of soil, as they disclose how natural phenomena and human activity have affected its composition. A similar approach is evident in a new collection of essays by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, On The Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography. Understanding the past requires the broad and deep excavation of layers of change over time. As Lefebvre wrote in 1963, “We cannot understand the current situation of such a commune [Campan Valley, France] without looking back at the Middle Ages (even beyond).” Readers will find variations of this assertion throughout On the Rural.
Lefebvre (1901-1991) was a prolific scholar whose oeuvre ranged from Marxism to urban studies to “everyday life.” Born in Hagetmau in southwestern France, he attended the Sorbonne and helped translate some of Marx’s works into French in the late 1920s. During World War II Lefebvre was active with the Resistance while he studied the history and sociology of the Pyrnenees; after the war he taught at universities in Strasbourg and Nanterre. He composed these essays between 1949 and 1969, and this 2022 collection presents them together, and several in English translation, for the first time. While the essays range in subject and intervention, questions about rural spaces inform each one. Lefebvre did not grieve the passing of an idyllic rural way of life; rather, he saw the rural as a site of world-historic transformation that demanded scrutiny. In his introduction to a 1970 monograph, From the Rural to the Urban (which is the the first piece in this collection), Lefebvre tells readers that “It is the transition from the rural to the urban that is taking place, is being prepared before our very eyes and for our consideration.” From old rural villages to recently-constructed urban centers, new problems presented themselves for investigation.
As the subtitle of this volume indicates, Lefebrve applied an interdisciplinary approach to his craft. “[R]ural sociology,” he pointed out in 1949, was “…a science of the present that cannot do without history, for here as elsewhere, the historical persists and acts upon the present.” Good sociology, in other words, needs good history, and vice-versa. Lefebvre mentions Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States in passing, spending most of his time investigating France and Italy. Yet the cover of On The Rural features a striking photograph of a solitary African American man working a plow pulled by a pair of mules. The image, taken for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s or 1940s, seems at odds with the European context of these essays, but not entirely. “Unequal economic and social development” (original emphasis) across France, Lefebvre noted in a 1954 essay, created stark contrasts between thriving areas and a “...breakdown of the social structure” in others. Moreover, not only were agricultural nations underdeveloped, they were “a source of raw materials for a few large industrial countries” to exploit. Similar arguments have been made about regions of the United States that are less developed than others because of their reliance on agriculture (the South and cotton) or extractive industries (Appalachia and coal). Thus, although the cover photograph is not directly connected to any of these essays, it serves as a visual cue that Lefebvre’s work can assist in the study of rural areas throughout the world.
A recurrent theme in On the Rural is that history matters because it gives structure to people's lives. In “The Village Community,” originally published in 1956, Lefebvre located several “sociological fossils” that persisted in Argelès such as collective ownership and bonds of kinship based on vicinity instead of consanguinity. In an earlier essay, “Social Classes in Rural Areas,” (1950) he applied the phrase “medieval holdovers” to the living and working arrangements of agricultural laborers in Grosseto, Italy: “Communities of family sharecroppers of between sixty and eighty people live in a “large house” and farm sharecropped lands of 100 hectares and more,” he wrote. Lefebvre saw contradictions and paradoxes in these historical remnants: to wit, families were highly patriarchal, “Yet the sharecropper is not free” from feudal obligations; farmers formed modern organizations such as labor unions that operated “under medieval conditions.”
This volume would have benefited from a description of the broader context in which Lefebvre wrote. The late-1940s to the mid-1970s in France are known as the Les Trente Glorieuses (“the Glorious Thirty”), shorthand for the economic miracle that mirrored the golden age of American capitalism of the same period. National affluence, prosperity, and economic modernization had a profound impact on people’s daily lives and material well-being. Still, there were limits to the glory. In the aftermath of WWII France’s dominion in Indochina (present-day Vietnam) and Algeria met its demise: the Viet Minh defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and Algeria won independence in 1962. In fact, throughout the postwar era nationalist liberation movements in these and other Third World countries organized their grievances around many of the issues Lefebvre discusses in On The Rural, including agrarian reform, land use, class, and the fate of the peasantry.
That said, there are subtle hints to this context throughout On The Rural. In a 1953 article, “Perspectives on Rural Sociology,” Lefebvre explained that “At present, throughout the world, the ‘peasant problem’ has been or is being questioned in multiple forms.” Indeed, this problem acquired global significance during the Cold War. In 1954, for instance, the United States backed a coup against the democratically-elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, who introduced land reforms that threatened the investments of the United Fruit Company. Even though Lefebvre does not mention this or similar events, it’s hard to believe they didn’t affect his analyses.
One indication that such incidents informed Lefebvre’s scholarship is the framework he used to examine people, power, and property. For some readers, “Marxism” evokes the specter of starry-eyed revolutionaries who want to remake the world. It is the stuff of manifestos, pulp passed around at the barricades. Lefebvre’s Marxism, on the contrary, is scientific. He synthesized the existing literature, including Marx, Ricardo, and Lenin, tested his critique of ground rent against statistics, and suggested potential topics for future research. In “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology” (1956) and “The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Ground Rent” (1964), he described “the characteristics of [a] permanent agricultural crisis, which are themselves located in the overall crisis of capitalism.” Monopolies of property and exploitation and different forms and rates of rent created regional variations in French agriculture. Large capitalist farms produced crops and livestock while “a semifeudal mode of production still stubbornly persists and survives…in the South of France.” Using a Marxist analysis, Lefebvre discerned the evolution of agricultural developments and power relationships that a neoclassical perspective would have ignored.
On the Rural is a remarkable collection. Far too many works about rural life and agriculture revolve around cliches and tropes. To be sure, Lefebvre documented customs and traditions, but he saw them in the context of a slowly-changing social landscape. These changes, moreover, were neither clear nor consistent. The slow transition of the French peasantry to farm laborers and to small capitalists was full of ambiguity, contingency, and irony. In an age of deep specialization, it’s also refreshing to read the work of someone who crossed disciplinary boundaries with ease. Lefebvre wrote as a historian, a sociologist, a geographer, a political-economist, and a philosopher. This makes for challenging reading at times but there are also brilliant passages that will goad readers on to the next page. In describing a Paris street, for example, Lefebvre’s prose is poetic: “Juxtaposed structures, from Roman ruins to banks, reproduce the ages of history in space, the succession of eras. The past is inscribed in the wounds of the stones themselves.” Just as in urban Paris, rural spaces are not devoid of history. They are products of human interventions, and On the Rural is an excellent place to learn about them.