Description
Book SynopsisFredrik 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.
Trade ReviewScarcity 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 DevelopmentRarely 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 StraitA 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 AgeTracing 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
