Rural Sociology · 2018 · 62 citations · 97 references
Social SciencesPolitical ScienceSociologyAmerican PoliticsPolitical SociologyRural SociologyRural EconomyRural SocietyRural Political EconomyRural Power RelationsRural RelationsRural State Relations
Rurality in the United States is routinely linked to conservatism, yet scholars have offered diverse explanations such as antigovernmentalism, religion, education gaps, manual labor, poverty, primitivism, and a culture of poverty. This study examines what aspects of rural life attract conservative labels, theorizing rural politics through pro‑state, stateless, and anti‑state positions and proposing anarchism as a lens for the stateless and anti‑state perspectives. The authors synthesize literature that portrays the state as an agent of industrialization, extraction, exploitation, consolidation, and corporatization in rural America with rural political scholarship. They conclude that the state is the persistent driver of rural dispossession and depopulation, overlooked by previous explanations.
Abstract Popular discourse today so weds rurality and conservatism together in the United States that one does not seem quite at home without the other. But what is it really about the rural that beckons slapjack labels of conservatism? Scholars and practitioners, only a handful of them rural sociologists, have suggested a variety of explanations: antigovernmentalism, religion, lack of education, manual labor, poverty, primitivism, and a culture of poverty, among others. Each of these approaches, though, misses a sustained agent of rural dispossession and depopulation: the state. This article theorizes rural politics through pro‐state, stateless, and anti‐state positions. I bridge literature that documents the state as an agent of industrialization, extraction, exploitation, consolidation, and corporatization in rural America and literature on politics and the rural. In the process of my review, I suggest anarchism can help explain the significance and potential of the stateless and anti‐state positions in rural politics.
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