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The American Rural Value Pattern

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Leo R. Ward C.S.C.
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Extract

Man has to live by values, a fact brought out with a sort of dogged repetition by Tolstoi. To live is to value, no matter what else it may be. So Tolstoi rightly claimed, and he also said that to live as man is to rate things up and down, as good and as evil. It is to know, and to use a measuring rod which we often call a norm or standard. Tolstoi said that we do not know at all what life would be like without this constant valuing and rating of acts and things. If that is so, man is the more or less consciously valuing animal, and the materials for a philosophy of value are at least as old as mankind, though this philosophy becomes evident only in men such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and Kant.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 1955 , pp. 377 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1955

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References

1 Tolstoi, in “Life,” part of the volume What is to be Done? (New York, 1922).Google Scholar

2 Perry, Ralph Barton, General Theory of Value (New York, 1926, new printing Cambridge, 1950)Google Scholar. The second volume is called Realms of Value (Cambridge, 1954).Google Scholar

3 See The Sociology of Rural Life, by T. Lynn Smith, for the ideas “neighborhood” and “community” (New York, 1953) pp. 367–384.Google Scholar

4 Brownell, Baker, The Human Community (New York: 1950)Google Scholar. DrBrownell, 's The College and the Community (New York, 1952)Google Scholar is also noteworthy, above all ch. 4, “Technology and the Human Limit.”

5 Stamp, L. Dudley, Land for Tomorrow (Bloomington, Indiana, 1952)Google Scholar; Brittain, Robert, Let There Be Bread (New York, 1952)Google Scholar. The best guide to excellent works in this line was The Land, a quarterly recently published at Bel Air, Maryland.

6 Fritts and Gwinn have said these things extremely well, in Fifth Avenue to Farm (New York, 1938).Google Scholar