7 Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Different Kind of State

Gilbert, Jess

doi:10.9783/9780812201031.129

Cited by 11 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…These theories reflected a convergence of social theory and activism, including prominently Habermas's contrast between communicative and strategic rationalities and action. These theories were married to earlier, particularly New Deal, experiments in grassroots democracy that were influenced by Dewey (Gilbert, 2003), and communitarian political theories. The resulting, somewhat inchoate theory of participatory democracy advocated locally-based deliberative processes, such as that implemented by the NRCS and TNC, viewing such procedures as more capable of substantive democracy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Class: an Essential Aspect of Watershed Planning

Adams

2005

J Agric Environ Ethics

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A study of a watershed planning process in the Cache River Watershed in southern Illinois revealed that class divisions, based on property ownership, underlay key conflicts over land use and decision-making relevant to resource use. A class analysis of the region indicates that the planning process served to endorse and solidify the locally-dominant theory that landownership confers the right to govern. This obscured the class differences between large full-time farmers and small-holders whose livelihood depends on non-farm labor. These two groups generally opposed one another regarding wetland drainage. Their common identity as ''property owner'' consolidated the power wielded locally by large farmers. It also provided an instrument -the planning document -for state and federal government agencies to enhance their power and to bring resources to the region. The planning process simultaneously ameliorated conflicts between government agencies and the large farmers, while enhancing the agencies' capacity to reclaim wetlands. In this contradictory manner, the plan promoted the environmental aims of many smallholders, and simultaneously disempowered them as actors in the region's political economy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Class: an Essential Aspect of Watershed Planning

Adams

2005

J Agric Environ Ethics

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“…4. The SWCDs, like several other US Department of Agriculture programs, explicitly incorporated local-level democracy to implement and administer new federal-level programs established during the New Deal (see Gilbert, 2000Gilbert, , 2003. 5.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watershed Planning: Pseudo-democracy and its Alternatives – The Case of the Cache River Watershed, Illinois

et al. 2005

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Watershed planning has typically been approached as a technical problem in which water quality and quantity as influenced by the hydrology, topography, soil composition, and land use of a watershed are the significant variables. However, it is the human uses of land and water as resources that stimulate governments to seek planning. For the past decade or more, many efforts have been made to create democratic planning processes, which, it is hoped, will be viewed as legitimate by those the plans regulate. This article uses a case study of the Cache River watershed in southernmost Illinois to analyze the complicated historical and political economic context of a specific watershed planning process that occurred from 1993 through 1995. This article assesses the claims made about the democratic, grass-roots, deliberative nature of the planning process and casts doubt on the legitimacy of its outcomes. It also proposes an alternative form of governance that would be both democratic and capable of generating outcomes viewed as legitimate by most affected parties.

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Section: Reform Social Science In Theory: William M Leiserson and Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The social survey movement, institutional economics, and agricultural economics and rural sociology all emerged as part of a diverse movement in the social sciences that grafted empirical inquiry to reform politics from the turn of the century to the interwar period (Gilbert, 2003, Rutherford, 1994, 2000Silverberg, 1998;Gilbert & Baker, 1997;Greenewald & Anderson, 1996;Skocpol, 1992;Bulmer, Bales, & Sklar, 1991;Fitzpatrick, 1990). As Jess Gilbert has puckishly and aptly suggested, "low modernism," as opposed to high modernism, defined this reform social science and its commitment to empiricism and description (Gilbert, 2003). Following the intellectual line of Deweyan pragmatism, the advocates of reform social science held that tendencies toward a priori thought and universalized assumptions about social conditions (such as the primacy of property rights, or the widespread middle-class belief that poverty resulted from the individual moral failings of the poor) prevented recognition of the new and harsh realities that governed industrial society.…”

Section: Reform Social Science In Theory: William M Leiserson and Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has not always been easy to imagine or reconstruct past social scientific practices that incorporated local specificity and variety while still claiming the epistemological status of science and remaining politically relevant. Historical studies of the social survey movement, institutional economics, and other empirically oriented movements within early-twentieth-century social science, however, have pointed in this direction, while Jess Gilbert has directly confronted Scott's critique of high modernism with the "low modernism" of New Deal agricultural economics (Gilbert, 2003).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Local knowledge, state power, and the science of industrial labor relations: William Leiserson, David Saposs, and American labor economics in the interwar years

Wang

2010

J History Behavioral Science

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Recent scholarship has frequently emphasized modern states' use of social science to impose universalized conceptions of rationality and order upon diverse, highly localized settings. The New Deal era experiences of William M. Leiserson and David J. Saposs, however, provide an analytical alternative. As students of the pioneering labor economist John R. Commons, Leiserson and Saposs sought to create mechanisms for state oversight of industrial labor relations that recognized local practices and arrangements. Although their approach failed to take hold within the National Labor Relations Board, localized institutional and political contingencies, and not a hegemonic modernism, account best for their frustrated aspirations in the late 1930s.

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7 Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Different Kind of State

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Class: an Essential Aspect of Watershed Planning

Class: an Essential Aspect of Watershed Planning

Watershed Planning: Pseudo-democracy and its Alternatives – The Case of the Cache River Watershed, Illinois

Local knowledge, state power, and the science of industrial labor relations: William Leiserson, David Saposs, and American labor economics in the interwar years

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