Family Farming and Capitalist Development in Greek Agriculture: A Critical Review of the Literature Charalambos Kasimis and Apostolos G. Papadopoulos* HE GROWING TREND of integration of Greek family farms into the wider T economy provides the main hypothesis around which our discussion evolves. This hypothesis is related to a politicdl economy penpective, which needs to be properly attuned to the study of the Greek rural economy and society. Both socio-demographic changes and ethnographic insights constitute an important basis for considering the transformation of the Greek family farm as such, but more stress is placed here upon the family farm as a unit of pro- duction characterized at the family level, simultaneously, by both labour and capital. Of course, the traditions of ‘agricultural social science’ (Karavidas 1978) and ‘rural ethnography and sociology’ (Damianakos et al. 1978; Darnianakos 1987) in Greece, produce valuable strings for tying together the local and/or regional focus with the macro-social and sectoral analysis. Furthermore, the rising significance of comparative regional analyses and local inter-disciplinary studies exert pressure for the consideration of an integrated approach towards the study of social and economic transformation of the Greek countryside. This call is not for uncritically introducing western tools of social science into research on Greek agriculture and rural society in general. However, such an introduction should lead to a cross-fertilization of ideas among rural social scientists and to the stimulation of an ‘indigenous’ theorization process on family farming. Our attempt here starts from a discussion of the definition and theoretical underpinnings of the family farm as developed in western bibliography. The second part provides the contextual information for the following discussion of Greek family farming. Thus, the next parts are devoted to a review of the debate over the development of capitalism in Greek agriculture and then to a critical evaluation of the writings on family farming in the post-1980 period in “Kasimis: Institute of Urban and Rural Sociology, National Centre for Social Research (EKKE), Athens, and Department of Economics, University of Patras; Papadopoulos: Department of Economics, University of Patras, Greece. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK 6 1997 European Society for Rural Sociology. Sociofogia Ruralis Volume 37, No. 2, 1997 and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0038-0199