Village peasant culture generated an egalitarian communal variant of organic social theory.

Evidence

Whereas the medieval hierarchical model emphasized distinctions in status and estate, a second variation of the organic theory, growing out of peasant experience and village culture, was based on the leveling of differences and stressed, instead, the primacy of community, the collective will of the people, and the idea of internal self-regulation and consent. Here the communal whole was still greater and more important than the sum of the parts, but the parts were of equal or nearly equal value. Ideas that stressed the common consent of the people and mutual will of the community represented a formulation of the organic theory at the communal or socialist end of the political spectrum. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 354

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The organic theory of society took three politically distinct forms — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 338; Organic communal theory supplied the rationale for European peasant rebellions. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 355; Pre-modern social group conception was centripetal and hierarchical, not horizontal — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 65

Broader Connections

• Organic communal theory supplied the rationale for European peasant rebellions. #corroborates (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 355
• Pre-modern social group conception was centripetal and hierarchical, not horizontal #contradicts (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 65