Abstract
A key premise of critical theory is that if existing social arrangements are to be transformed, these must first be put into historical context. This is to establish the extent to which the current order is historically contingent and thus potentially open to transformation. Taking the historical evolution of the concept of economic growth as its object of analysis, this chapter develops a narrative intellectual history of the concept of economic growth and provides an account of how and why governments have become committed to growth. It reveals that this is a relatively new feature of the global political economy, making it more liable to transformation than is commonly assumed.
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Notes
- 1.
Reus-Smit (1999) argues that the moral purpose of the state passed through three key stages before the modern era. In ancient Greece, the moral purpose of the state was the cultivation of a particular form of communal existence that Aristotle called the bios politicos, or the political life. This facilitated a form of participatory democracy shaped by the norms of procedural justice in which decisions and adjudications were reached through political discourse. In contrast, the moral purpose of the Renaissance Italian city-states was the cultivation of civic glory, or grandezza. At this time, the state existed primarily to promote communal grandeur and the growth of the city’s power. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a system of sovereign absolutist states emerged in Europe, whose legitimacy rested on a set of pre-modern Christian and dynastic constitutional values.
- 2.
Some critics, such as Greenfeld (2001), maintain that Weber (1930) greatly overestimated the significance of these developments to the emergence of a market society .
- 3.
A similar process occurred to greater or lesser extent in all other industrialising capitalist states at about the same time (Alexander 2011).
- 4.
Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, and viewed the supply of capital as the main determinant of national welfare. Mercantilists also believed that the total value of world trade was fixed, which implied a policy of seeking balance-of-payment surpluses to increase capital inflow, primarily through protectionism (Black et al. 2009b). The physiocrats, meanwhile rejected the mercantilist belief that wealth originated in exchange, and accorded priority instead to land, arguing that improved farming techniques, fiscal reform and free trade in agricultural produce would stimulate capital accumulation and wealth generally (Scott and Marshall 2009).
- 5.
It should be noted that the term neoclassical economics was not widely used before the 1950s (Aspromourgos 1986).
- 6.
Mill ’s political economy also prefigured the ecological critique of growth that was to emerge in the 1960s by over a century. For a brief discussion of Mill’s ecological credentials, see O’Riordan (1981).
- 7.
Some analysts, such as Gertner (2010), argue that access to GDP figures was one of the main reasons why governments were able to respond quickly to the global financial crisis of 2008 in a way they were not able to during the crisis of the 1930s.
- 8.
Taylorism refers to practices of scientific management in the workplace, involving the breaking down of production into simplified individual tasks and the close supervision and micromanagement of workers (O’Brien and Williams 2007).
- 9.
Other significant texts that warned of the ecological costs of and limits to economic growth at this time include Carson (1962), Ehrlich (1968), Rozak (1969), Commoner (1972) and Daly (1973). For a review of these texts see Davison (2001).
- 10.
This periodisation is consistent with a number of other works from a range of disciplines. For example, Friman (2002) combines discourse analysis with intellectual history to demonstrate that whilst the concept of economic growth per se has existed for at least a century and a half, the belief that growth does not face any limits postdates World War II and thus only became hegemonic from that time on. Another important work that comes to similar temporal conclusions about the commitment to growth is Arndt (1978), this time from the perspective of economic history.
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Ferguson, P. (2018). From Market Society to Growth Society. In: Post-growth Politics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_3
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