Adam Smith’s Green Thumb and Malthus’ Three Horsemen: Cautionary tales from classical political economy

This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defenses of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way

A Discussion of Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein's <i>The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto</i>

The Port Huron Statement was one of the most important manifestos of the New Left in the United States. A foundational statement of the theme of “participatory democracy,” the text had an important influence on post-1960s politics and, arguably, on post-1960s political science. The recent publication of a new edition of the Statement is an occasion for reflection on its importance. And so we have invited a distinguished cast of political scientists shaped by the events of the sixties to comment on the impact of the Statement on their own way of envisioning and practicing political science.</jats:p

The austere life

Since the 2008 financial crisis, austerity has been deployed as a public policy geared towards reducing sovereign debt and restoring economic order, on the one hand, and descried as an example of punitive moralizing by political and economic elites, on the other. This article challenges the economic understanding of the concept of austerity. Some recent examples from popular culture are adduced to indicate societal dissatisfaction with the accumulation of material things, examples of what has been called ‘the new minimalism’. Contextualizing this phenomenon within a culture of intensive consumption, it is argued here that there is a history of austerity as an aversion to ostentation and excess in western tradition that runs from the Stoics through to recent pronouncements by Pope Francis and that provides a vantage point from which to question the economistic deployment of the term. When understood in this way, the austere can be seen to carry an important political meaning today and may contribute to the sorts of transformation necessary in order to reduce material demand on a societal scale. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Material demand reduction’.</jats:p