Читать книгу The New Environmental Economics - Eloi Laurent - Страница 14

In Chapter VI of Book IV of his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, John Stuart Mill devotes key developments to what he calls “the Stationary State.”⁹ The question asked by Mill is that of the fundamental purpose of economic activity: “To what goal? Toward what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress?”

Although he believes in wealth creation through the application of liberal economics principles, Mill writes that “the increase of wealth is not boundless: At the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state.” The revolutionary nature of Mill’s questioning of the very finalities of the liberal economy lies in his understanding of the profound impact human societies are already having on the biosphere. “If the Earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it,” he writes, “for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compel them to it.”

But if Mill is pessimistic on the finality and purpose of what we would now call economic growth, he is optimistic on the ability of humans to find a new path to development and believes that “a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement.”

It is in the building of fair and shared prosperity that humans will find this new meaning, according to Mill: “Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.”

Hence, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mill discovers the sustainability–justice nexus. While a number of scholars today advocate “de-growth” in order to avoid the worst of ecological crises, it was John Stuart Mill, a founding father of the neo-classical school, who first envisioned, at the peak of the first industrial revolution, the transition to a “stationary state” where social and environmental concerns would be addressed jointly.