In many eighteenth-century agricultural texts, peasants were depicted as an impediment to agrarian improvement, superstitious and resistant to novelty. That was the stereotype one often encountered, in any case, in more programmatic writing about agriculture from this period. A closer look at the era's technical literature tells a more complicated story, however. Much as traveling European naturalists relied on local intermediaries in far corners of the globe, elite agricultural improvers back home relied on local rural knowledge as they drafted a new technical literature on farming. This article looks at Jacob Guyer (also known as Kleinjogg), a Swiss farmer who became an enlightened celebrity after the Zurich doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biography of him in 1761. Hirzel called Kleinjogg a “philosophical farmer”; the article explores the implications of this title, and examines the various ways that elite eighteenth-century authors used contact with rural people and direct experience of farming as a source of authority.

中文翻译：

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农场上的苏格拉底：18 世纪德国和瑞士的农业改良和农村知识

在许多 18 世纪的农业文献中，农民被描绘成阻碍土地改良、迷信和抗拒新鲜事物的人。无论如何，这是这一时期关于农业的更具程序性的写作中经常遇到的刻板印象。然而，仔细观察那个时代的技术文献会发现一个更复杂的故事。就像旅行的欧洲博物学家依赖于世界各地的当地中介一样，国内的精英农业改良者在起草新的农业技术文献时也依赖于当地的农村知识。本文着眼于雅各布·盖尔（又名 Kleinjogg），这位瑞士农民在 1761 年苏黎世医生汉斯·卡斯帕·赫泽尔 (Hans Caspar Hirzel) 出版了他的传记后成为开明的名人。赫泽尔称克莱因乔格为“哲学农民”；