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Rural Conservatism or Anarchism? The Pro‐state, Stateless, and Anti‐state Positions
Author(s) -
Ashwood Loka
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
rural sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.083
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1549-0831
pISSN - 0036-0112
DOI - 10.1111/ruso.12226
Subject(s) - stateless protocol , conservatism , rurality , corporatization , politics , state (computer science) , sociology , poverty , political economy , economic growth , political science , development economics , rural area , law , economics , algorithm , computer science
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.