Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 313

In the standard histories of German agronomy Thaer’s Grundsätze der rationellen Landwirthschaft (4 vols. 1809–1812) is treated as a founding moment, the initiation of an agricultural science capable of systematic development. As with all such founding moments, there is a prehistory, but this has long been treated as a prior history of error and misunderstanding. For Verena Lehmbrock, however, Thaer is a point of arrival, not of departure; she is interested in what came before, how Thaer was able to present himself as an innovator, and what it was about his work that led others to accept this stance. Writing about agriculture was not a novel idea in early nineteenth-century Germany: since the early 1800s a veritable agromania had developed, with an increasing number of specialized journals, pamphlets, and books seeking to promote agricultural improvement. Lehmbrock is not so much interested in the various recommendations these texts made in themselves, but the status these recommendations had; why such an enormous literature was generated, for whom, by whom. Commanding an enviable knowledge of hundreds of texts in this Enlightenment literature, she seeks to combine the techniques of the history of science with those of the history of agriculture without resort to modernizing generalizations about ‘experience’, ‘theory’, ‘practice’, ‘scholarship’ or ‘empiricism’. All of these terms had a particular contemporary connotation that is not necessarily the one we have today. In part the book draws upon arguments about agricultural practice; but it also examines the terms in which this practice is argued about. For English readers, she includes a lucid overview (pp. 253–69) entitled ‘The farming thinker: agricultural knowledge and enlightenment in Germany 1750–1820’.

This title reverses the German of the book’s title – ‘the thinking farmer’ – and this reversal points to one of the book’s central ambiguities: the relation of the writer to the material about which that writer writes. Those who wrote about farming had to have some knowledge of agricultural practice, but, on the other hand, also the time and opportunity to write, sometimes at great length. In the process complementary stereotypes emerged – of the writer remote from the real work of farming, of the farmer rigidly adhering to established practices and resistant to change. As she writes,

The discourse of improvement in the oeconomic Enlightenment was an epistemic and a social arena in which claims to knowledge about agriculture were negotiated. The prize of holding one’s own in this arena was won through the power to define the form and content of a so-called scientific oeconomy. We know the outcome, but little about the route to it (p. 25).

‘Oeconomy’ was at the time synonymous with the agricultural economy – and so reference to an ‘oeconomic Enlightenment’ brings together the daily life of agricultural labour with the intellectual prospects of the European Enlightenment. At first glance Thaer’s book is continuous with this, linking ‘rationalism’ to agricultural practice. But rationell here denotes efficiency and profit-orientation; rational would by contrast denote the conduct of agriculture according to general rational principles, seeking greater yields for the own sake, or prescribing best practice in animal husbandry.

Following an introduction sketching out the purposes of the book – not a history of ideal agricultural practice, nor of the provenance of recommendations for such practice, but instead how arguments about good practice were formed, contested, legitimated, and diffused – the first major section deals with agricultural improvement (Verbesserung) around 1800. There follows the core of the book, a series of five ‘perspectives’, beginning with an outline of the work of Michael Irlbeck, a Bavarian farmer who, asked to draft a report for the Bavarian Agricultural Association, produced in 1834 a three-volume treatise for administrators and farmers. Irlbeck farmed about 10 hectares of poor land on high ground, and had dedicated himself to its systematic improvement. He was critical of ‘the learned’, by which he meant those with a university education; and especially critical of the universal prescriptions fostered by the oeconomic Enlightenment, such as the use of clover. Foreshadowing some aspects of the Green Revolution of the twentieth century, he asked why clover was supposed to be suited to his farming since it required, for his land, such intensive fertilization. Importantly, he did not question the aim of improvement, but questioned how it might be realized. His solution, however, dated from the very writings he criticized: that each recommendation should be vetted by a government official. Furthermore, as Lehmbrock demonstrates, he used the new vocabulary of a profit-oriented agriculture to defend established practices. He turned the rhetorical devices used by agricultural writers and officials on these writers and officials themselves.

Lehmbrock reviews the contention (p. 84) that up until the later nineteenth century all the various measures of agricultural improvement originated in farming practice, not in the literature of agricultural improvement. And here she points to a problem in the historiography: that eighteenth-century writings have generally been interpreted by modern Enlightenment historians, while agricultural historians have generally focused on other sources. If, then, the work of agricultural historians is taken into account, she suggests that the evidence tends to support Irlbeck’s thesis that he was not the only Bauer open to reform although the improvement literature saw established practice, and its practitioners, as the problem. Enlightenment history is intellectual history, but farmers are not intellectuals.

Having arrived at this insight she selects three mid-eighteenth-century periodicals and examines the manner in which they construct the figure of the ‘simple Bauer’, impervious to ‘science’. To this she contrasts the ‘denkende Landwirt’ of the book’s title, an enlightened, reform-oriented agricultural producer who first appears in Der Fleiβige und fröhliche Wirthschaftsmann, published in 1811 and 1812, thus coinciding with Thaer’s volumes. Lehmbrock here makes the point that ‘before’ and ‘after’ share a focus not on agricultural relations, but on the character of agricultural producers. Furthermore, she also makes the point that an apparent continuity in arguments over ‘practice’ is moderated by the intervention of Immanuel Kant. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shifted the meaning of ‘empirical’ from unlearned, unlettered, to our present-day neutral sense. The meanings of ‘science’ and ‘practice’ were likewise transformed by Kant. And just as surely as an enthusiasm for Critical Philosophy swept through German universities at the turn of the century, it reached the ‘agricultural sciences’ too. Thaer had read his Kant (p. 183), and was part of this transformation.