Affluence and Freedom : An Environmental History of Political Ideas (Paperback)

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One. The critique of ecological reason

The fabric of liberty

The other history. Ecology and the labour question

Subsisting, dwelling, knowing

Autonomy and abundance

Chapter Two. Sovereignty and property. Political philosophy and the land

The political affordances of the land

Grotius: Empire and possession

Locke: the improving citizen

Chapter Three. Grain and the market. The order of commerce and the organic economy in the eighteenth century

The good use of the land

The agrarian kingdom of the Physiocrats

The liberal pact: Adam Smith

Two types of growth

Fichte: the ubiquity of the moderns

Chapter Four. The new ecological regime

From one liberalism to another

The paradoxes of autonomy: Guizot

The paradoxes of abundance: Jevons

Colonial extractions

Extraction-autonomy: Tocqueville

Chapter Five. Industrial democracy. From Proudhon to Durkheim

Revolutions and industry

Property and labour

Proudhon as critic of the liberal pact

The fraternal idiom

Durkheim: ‘carbon sociology’

The political affordances of coal

Chapter Six. The technocratic hypothesis. Saint-Simon and Veblen

Material flows and market arrangements

The technological normativity of the moderns

Laying bare the productive schema

Veblen and the cult of efficiency             

The engineer and property

Chapter Seven. Nature in a market society

Marx as a thinker of autonomy

Putting the forest to good use

Technology and agronomy

Conquering the globe

Karl Polanyi: protecting society, protecting nature

Disembedding

Socialism, liberalism, conservatism

Chapter Eight. The great acceleration and the eclipse of nature

Freedom from want

Emancipation and acceleration: Herbert Marcuse

Oil and atomic power: invisible energies

Chapter Nine. Risks and limits: the end of certainties

Alarms and controversies

The critique of development and political naturalism

Risk and the reinvention of autonomy

The impasse: between collapse and resilience

Chapter Ten. The end of the modern exception and political ecology

Symmetrizations

Authority and composition

Under naturalism lies production 

Unequal ecological exchange

Provincializing critique

A new conceptual cartography

Changing expectations of justice

Autonomy without abundance

Towards a new critical subject

Chapter Eleven. The self-protection of the Earth.

Changing expectations of justice

Autonomy without abundance

Towards a new critical subject

Conclusion. Reinventing liberty

Notes

Bibliography