Pierre Charbonnier - Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas (Polity 2021)

Charbonnier’s book is simultaneously an intellectual history and an argument. The argument is that modernity has been shaped by an alliance and polarization between two guiding ideals – those of affluence and autonomy. Through this alliance autonomy is now understood as “the ability to escape the vagaries of fortune and lack that humiliate human existence”. The book is about the history of this alliance presented in three blocks. First, the book focuses on pre industrial modernity with land as the terrain through which to imagine conquest and appropriation as something like “freedom”. Second, the book focuses on the 19th century as fossil fuels reshape political thought in an industrial and mechanical world, engendering new conceptions of solidarity and liberty. Last the book ends by studying an even greater transformation – described here as the Anthropocene – one that begins in postindustrial society and through which we are still living today. Here Charbonnier argues that the alliance between autonomy and affluence – the colonial, industrial and extractive conditions that maintained it are all exhausted. No longer can freedom be understood through the ideology of material accumulation.  

The takeaway from this history is that contemporary ecological projects centered around the critique of growth require a fundamental political transformation of how one thinks about autonomy. At stake in critiques of limitless accumulation are the very terms in which political philosophy has understood freedom.  

The early chapters of the book may prove challenging for those not completely invested in the history of political thought. Nonetheless from chapter 5 onwards the story picks up with a fascinating account of how the ideals of freedom and affluence plays out within the work of diverse thinkers such as Marx, Durkheim, Proudhon, Polanyi, Veblen, Marcuse. This allows for novel readings of familiar theorists - Durkheim’s sociological project for example now appears inseparable from a carbon imaginary, or Tocqueville’s understanding of autonomy inseparable from extraction.  

Definitely recommend reading it – chapters 1, 10 and 11 especially carefully.  - BK