Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics*

John Duncan Powell

American Political Science Review, 1970, vol. 64, issue 2, 411-425

Abstract: The basic social relations of peasant life are directly related to an environment characterized by extreme scarcity. The major factor of productive wealth in agriculture is land, to which the peasant has little or no free access. Labor—his own, and that of his family members—is available to the peasant, but this relatively unproductive factor must be applied to land in order to generate wealth. Few other outlets for productive labor employment are available to him. When the peasant is able to combine land and labor in a wealth-generating endeavor, his productivity is likely to be extremely low, due to limiting factors such as technology, capital, marketing information, and credit. All of these life aspects combine to hold down the peasant's income and preclude savings. He is, in a word, poor.Furthermore, the peasant is powerless against many threats which abound in his environment. There are disease, accident, and death, among the natural threats. There are violence, exploitation, and injustice at the hands of the powerful, among the human threats. The peasant knows that this environmental constellation is dangerous. He also knows that there is relatively little he can do about his situation, and, accordingly, his culture often features themes of vulnerability, calamity, and misfortune. As George Foster has neatly summarized if, the outlook this situation engenders in the peasant is the “Image of the Limited Good.”

Date: 1970
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:64:y:1970:i:02:p:411-425_12

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().