agriculturalism means A school of Chinese philosophy, prevalent during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770 to 221 BC), that advocated for peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism.
Why “agriculturalism” is a great word
A philosophical and ideological system centered on agriculture, particularly a classical Chinese school advocating peasant utopian communalism and egalitarian self-sufficiency. Formed from 'agricultural' (relating to the science or practice of farming) and the suffix '-ism' (denoting a system, principle, or ideological movement). Unlike 'agriculture,' which is the technical practice of farming itself, or 'agrarianism,' a broad social philosophy prizing rural life for its civic virtues, agriculturalism is a prescriptive ideology where the tilled field is the blueprint for the entire social and cosmic order. It is the dream of the Divine Farmer teaching his subjects to plant millet in shared fields; the calloused hand breaking soil with a wooden plow at dawn; the communal granary as the seat of government—a vision where human flourishing is rooted, quite literally, in the unadorned labor of the soil.
Etymology
From agricultural + -ism.
noun
- A school of Chinese philosophy, prevalent during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770 to 221 BC), that advocated for peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism.
- Any ideology that promotes agriculture.e.g.“Before the nineteenth century closed, industrial capitalism and agriculturalism came to a showdown.” — 1935, Roscoe Lewis Ashley, Our Contemporary Civilization: A Study of the Twentieth Century Renaissance, page 44:
- The practice of agriculture; agriculturism.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.