Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 181

Slavoj Žižek, in his analysis of the structure of contemporary ideology, famously draws upon the example of the organic apple. It is not, he argues, simply that we purchase organic apples for the positive qualities they embody of being ‘pure’ or ‘healthy’, we also choose to buy organic because we desire the ‘excess’ that the term organic signifies. When we buy organic, we also buy our own absolution from the negative qualities of the capitalist market: pollution, degradation of the soil, the use of pesticides, and so on. In the organic movement one sees the operation of modern ideology; the way in which modern consumerism allows us to simultaneously inhabit capitalist society and purchase an indulgence against it.

Philip Conford’s book does not take Žižek’s critique of the organic movement as its starting-point, but it might. The book is a detailed study of the overlapping influences upon the organic movement since the Second World War. It is in some respects a difficult work; there is no over-arching thesis or argument and the book does not have a neat concluding chapter or summary. There is a great deal of detail about the characters and publications of the movement, which is largely descriptive in character.

However, in other respects Conford’s book shares much with Žižek’s remark on apples, in that it is both flawed and brilliantly suggestive. Most remarkable is the way in which Conford demonstrates the rich interactions between the organic movement and wide range of other tendencies in intellectual endeavour, social and economic change, and political struggle. As such, the book implicitly raises a number of important questions and possible routes for further research.

For example, the transformation of the organic movement in the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of a greater consumer orientation (embodied in ‘wholefoods’, and the popularization of the Soil Association Standard as a propaganda tool in promoting organic eating) marks what is clearly an important moment in the generalization of organic culture. The full implications of this social and economic shift are rather underplayed, and it is clear that there is a great deal more to be said. Nonetheless Conford’s narrative is a starting point for further work.

Similarly, there are wonderful impressionistic chapters on the organic movement’s relationship to ecology, environmentalism, and wider political life. The complex, and sometimes strained, relationship between the organic movement and environmentalism is apparent. Nor was there a straight translation of the organic movement into the political terms of socialism or conservatism; although Conford demonstrates significant and important connections to the tradition of radical land reform and British utopian socialism.

Conford is, however, far from certain about how to address these ambiguities. It is worth considering why the ‘politics’ of something like the organic movement do not simply map onto existing political formations. Arguably, this has less to do with the concrete content of the organic idea than with the attraction of the ‘excessive’ attributes that Žižek has identified. An essential quality of any ideological object is precisely that it is able to convey more than its own particular content. Diverse political movements may seek to capture it precisely to determine how this excess is deployed. If anything, Conford’s account of the politics of the organic movement reflects the interpretive potential of viewing the movement as an ideological formation.

This, however, also marks an unfortunate limit of a book that is driven by an explicit empiricism, which Conford adopts in the introduction with somewhat perverse pride. This empiricist positioning is adopted in antipathy towards Social Movement Theory, though we never discover precisely what it is that Conford objects to in this theoretical orientation except that it is posited ‘a priori’. Yet, the author is quite happy to accept the a priori theoretical parameters of his own self-proclaimed ‘inductive process’. Ultimately, the absence of theoretical discussion limits the capacity of this work to draw wider conclusions about the nature of environmental movements or the historical significance of the organic movement itself.

Yet, one thing is clear from the detailed research that Conford had undertaken, and the rich intellectual and social world that his empirical word has uncovered: there are all sorts of possibilities for further analysis in the world of the organic movement. From the role of emerging consumption, to the influence of esotericism, or questions of class, gender and race, the application of the analytical categories, which historians have elsewhere successfully deployed, will doubtless reveal a great deal. The organic movement has much to thank Conford for in making available an accessible starting-point for this endeavour.