Abstract
The first lecture deals with the " agrarian question ", in the sense of classical political economy. K. Marx interpreted enclosures in England as one of the foundations of primitive capital accumulation and, in his best-known writings, envisaged the evolution of the agricultural sector towards capitalist production units. To support this prediction, he drew on the case of the United Kingdom, where large-scale capitalist farms - with their emblematic figures of the rentier landowner, the profit-seeking tenant farmer and the wage-earner - had become predominant. Elsewhere in Western Europe, however, developments in the lecture period XIXth and XXthcenturies have proved wrong: the vast majority of farms have remained family-run economic structures, giving rise to lively debates that this conference will explore in greater depth.
