Economic, Social and Political Lives of Homo Agricola

The purpose of this paper is to consider the economic, moral and political aspects of farmers’ life in different epochs of economic thought and in today’s days. The paper reviews the concepts of “homo economicus” and “homo politicus” and try to discover their characteristics in homo agricola. Economists, especially agricultural economists, in their sophisticated mathematical models seem to reduce farmers’ behavior to economic behavior or rather to self-interested homo economicus. However, as it is demonstrated, one component of homo agricola can be of economic and another one of political nature. Those components can be separated or can be together. Institutional economics, social economics and socio-economics are closer to actual human nature than homo economicus. The further research challenge is to develop the model that will be able to fully explain the questions involving all human behavior of homo agricola, that is farmer or rural man with set of different objectives.