This paper examines one of the most striking nineteenth-century critiques of the chemico-industrial transformation of agriculture and food, Pierre Leroux’s circulus. In response to the development of a capital-intensive system of agriculture, one that understood the introduction of artificial fertilizers as augmenting soil’s ability to produce without interruption and thereby yielding agriculture infinite productive gains, Leroux advanced a radical critique of extractive agriculture and developed an alternative theory of a sustainable circular economy. Leroux’s circulus was no naïve or utopian response to the chemico-industrial transformation of agriculture and food. It was deeply embedded in the scientific literature of its day and maintained scientific truths that an emerging chemical vision of the world evaded. This paper presents Leroux’s circulus within this wider scientific context and shows how it participated in a scientific debate on the industrial transformation of agriculture. It shows how Leroux’s circulus contained a vision of farming, food, and nature that, in the face of today’s intimately connected crises of agriculture and the climate may help us rethink our relationship to nature.

Michael Drolet is Senior Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought, at Worcester College, Oxford. He is an intellectual historian with interests in 18th, 19th, and 20th century French philosophy, and French political, social, and economic thought. He has written widely on French liberalism, French Romantic Socialism, and contemporary French thought.