How Every Farm Became a Firm: A Historico-Philosophical Genealogy of Farm Production Rationalities in Denmark From the 1900s Through the 2000s

Abstract

There has been at least three different ways of deciding what and how one should produce as a farmer over the course of the twentieth century. Yet, the one we in our time are most familiar with, that is thinking of the farm as any other firm, has come to be understood as the natural and necessary economic truth for agriculture. This master’s thesis investigates how farms came to be considered firms through a genealogical investigation anchored in Foucault’s methodology of historico-philosophical inquiry. To analyse this, the analysis juxtaposes the agrarian history with different theoretical conceptions of economic farmer decision making, to elucidate that the idea of producing for profit, which we have come to associate with farming, is historically specific and developed in the later part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, this gave insights on three different truths of economic production to the three different archetypical land users of the twentieth century. The peasant, as read through Chayanov’s theory of the peasant-household, undertakes subsistence-oriented production. The family farmer seeks to maximise the utility of the household – that being inside our outside on the farm, as found in Schmitt’s marginalist theory of the household. And lastly, the farm as a firm is profit-oriented, and arose with the writings of the American school of agrarian economics as a new creature unifying business and agriculture. To show how this came to be, how every farm became a firm in a sense, the thesis has unravelled this historically contingent economic truth of farms being firms and showing that it was in fact through historically contingent processes, that we came to know it as what it is today.