Środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne, 2019, nr 2

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Farmland and people as essential resources of Poland in the concepts of Polish agrarians (1931–1946)
(Wydawnictwo Naukowe WNPiD UAM w Poznaniu, 2019) Janicki, Tadeusz
Agrarianism was founded in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it exercised the greatest influence in the predominantly agricultural countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Central European agrarianism was the ideology of peasants and it proclaimed that land was the greatest wealth of the nation, agriculture was the most important branch of economy, and peasants were the morally healthiest and thus the most valuable part of the society. Agrarianism was a personalist ideology, which proclaimed a conception of man as a subject of social and economic life. It criticized both extreme liberalism and totalitarian political ideology and advocated the concept of a ‘third way of development’ – between capitalism and communism. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the formation and development of Polish agrarianism, and the related process of transfer and reception of knowledge. The analysis focuses on the concept of land, man and labor, formulated by the representatives of the mainstream of agrarianism. In the 1930s, the Polish agrarians voiced demands for land reform and the development of smallholder agriculture which, in their opinion, made an optimal use of the land, capital and labor, that is, the most important resources available to interwar Poland.