Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson; Carl Wennerlind

Published by Harvard University Press 2023

Scarcity

A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674293038

Overview
Contents

About this book

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind chart ideas about economic scarcity across centuries of European intellectual history. Showing how ideologies of infinite desire and infinite growth came to dominate capitalist societies, they argue for alternative modes of economic thought that respect nature’s boundaries in the face of climate crisis.

Reviews

Scarcity connects, dissects, and narrates the history of Western economic ideas about the natural limits to human societies…A new classic for historians of ideas.
-- Erle C. Ellis Science

Fascinating…The detailed narrative in Scarcity unpacks a dizzying array of “scarcities”… the pen portraits of key thinkers’ ideas about the relationship between population and resources are deft and extremely well written. Some of these portraits are familiar, but less obvious connections are drawn between the well-established history of political economy and economics, and a broader set of writers…the links are stimulating and well evidenced in this exceptionally ambitious piece of intellectual history.
-- Robert Mayhew Times Literary Supplement

Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind take an ambitious, sweeping approach [to scarcity]: their book covers 500 years, dividing generalized scarcity into seven subcategories and proposing that we reduce the influence of scarcity-based economics on how we deal with our planetary crises. Their critique is unequivocal.
-- Scott R. MacKenzie Los Angeles Review of Books

Scarcity offers a crash course on the many musings that philosophers, artists, theologians, and economists have had on the topic…[Albritton] Jonsson and Wennerlind’s historical investigations helpfully illustrate how tawdry matters of getting and spending have always been underlaid by questions about man, nature, technology, and their relations.
-- Robert Bellafiore Public Discourse

In their insightful Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, academic historians Frederick Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind argue that capitalist society needs to rethink the relation between the economy and nature. …Thorough and astute.
-- Ian Miller H-Net Reviews

An insightful and illuminating book. The history of economic thought has been jettisoned from the curriculum of most economics departments, to the great disadvantage of students. Examining the many historical meanings of ‘scarcity,’ Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind make a significant contribution both to curricular repair and to clear thinking about future economic policy.
-- Herman Daly, author of Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development

Rarely does a book cause you to reflect anew on ideas so fundamental to your life that they have become invisible. Scarcity does just this for dominant economic assumptions about the infinite nature of human appetites. Through a refreshing tour of European philosophical and economic thought, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind show how growth ideologies became ascendent—but also how regularly and thoroughly such ideas have been critiqued. The result is not just an intellectual history, but a primer on how to rethink our relationship with nature and the economy in a time of crisis.
-- Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

A brilliant book—lucid, luminescent, and learned—that is relevant across disciplines. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind expertly present centuries of Western debates about the relationship between nature and economy, alternating between visions of cornucopian abundance and earthly limits. The result is a timely intellectual genealogy for terms that define our contemporary debates on the planetary environment.
-- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

Tracing the long history of associations between scarcity and capitalism, this exemplary work examines the human hunger for abundance and its calamitous impact on the planet. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind show the potential of intellectual history to shed light on the problems that most bedevil our time, to the benefit of both scholarship and society at large.
-- Francesco Boldizzoni, author of Foretelling the End of Capitalism

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Beyond One Concept of Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Types of Scarcity before 1600 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
2. Cornucopian Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
3. Enlightened Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
4. Romantic Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
5. Malthusian Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
6. Socialist Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
7. Neoclassical Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
8. Planetary Scarcity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Conclusion: Toward an Age of Repair? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	230
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	287

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Keywords: anthropocene; climate change; mass extinction; global warming; great acceleration; malthus; consumer culture; fossil fuel; future; neoclassical; planetary; natural resources; utopian; cornucopianism; industrialization; environmentalism; agriculture

eBook

Published: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780674293038