Fall 2023 Colloquium - Denise Phillips

History, University of Tennessee

Title: The Peasant as Philosopher: Jacob Guyer and the Status of Rural Knowledge-Makers in Eighteenth-Century Central Europe 

Abstract: In 1761, the doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biographical sketch of Jacob Guyer, a farmer living in a small village just outside of Zurich. Hirzel’s book became a bestseller, and catapulted Guyer from rural obscurity to European-wide fame. Agricultural improvers showed intense interest in Guyer’s farm, and celebrated poets and even princes came to visit him, to meet the famous peasant in the flesh.  

What did it mean in the mid-eighteenth century for a peasant to be praised as a noteworthy authority, and even, in Guyer’s case, to be awarded the Enlightenment’s most vaunted honorific – the title of philosopher? My paper will use the case of Guyer (better known in the eighteenth century by his nickname Kleinjogg) to explore the complex relationships between social and epistemic authority in mid-eighteenth-century German-speaking Europe. The circumstances around Guyer’s fame represented an unusually intense example of elite interest in an ordinary rural person’s knowledge, but from a certain perspective he was less atypical than one might assume. In didactic and polemical writing from this period, elite authors often cast peasants as the enemies of reform, suspicious of novelty and wedded to old, outdated practices. In more technical writings, however, the same elite authors frequently quoted rural people as authorities.