A History of Ecological Economic Thought by Marco P. Vianna Franco and Antoine Missemer
本书追溯了16世纪至二战期间西方生态经济思想的演变，聚焦于经济嵌入自然与社会的共同本体论和跨学科认识论，为理解生态经济学的前史提供了独特视角。
In recent years—and after decades of relative silence—the history of economic thought has increasingly turned to exploring the relationship between economics and the environment, that is to say the way economists have progressively conceptualized environmental issues. This book makes a twofold original contribution to this still-undeveloped history of environmental thought.First, it covers a very long period, from the sixteenth century until World War II, whereas other such histories usually start from the 1960s, when the awareness of environmental issues really took off and environmental economics became an institutionalized subfield. Second, it focuses on ecological, rather than environmental, economic thought. To understand the difference between the two, consider first that environmental thought in the Western world has been historically structured around two mutually antagonistic views of nature—a contemplative view, valuing untouched and wild nature, and an instrumental and more anthropocentric one, valuing domesticated nature. This distinction still cuts across economics, mainstream environmental economics being associated with the latter, and ecological economics with the former. Moreover, ecological economics has been built up in opposition to the instrumental vision conveyed by environmental economics, as an attempt to overcome the dualism between the economy and nature that the latter supposes.Posited as an alternative to environmental economics, ecological economics started to emerge only from the 1970s onward; the authors, therefore, seek to draw up a history of ecological economic thinking before it became an autonomous and well-defined field. Obviously, and as they acknowledge, this could lead to anachronisms. Trying not to be naively retrospective, they circumscribe their subject on the basis of the contemporary definition of ecological economics. Ecological economic thought before ecological economics is then characterized by two main features. First, the idea that the economy is embedded in social activities and the natural world leads to the property of the common ontology of the social and the natural worlds—in other words, that economic, social, and natural activities are intrinsically interdependent. Next, another feature of ecological economics is that of interdisciplinarity. Considering a historical period in which disciplines, especially political economy, were not always clearly separated, this feature leads the authors to a second property, that of a common epistemology of the social and natural worlds as objects of inquiry. This means that the various disciplines are involved in a joint production of knowledge, tools, and languages. All ecological economic thought that would share this common ontology and epistemology would fall within the scope of the study. Nevertheless, more restrictions are introduced: the history is restricted to Western ecological thought, which unfortunately rules out interesting critical approaches to the Western dualism between humans and nature; next, classical authors, such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx, are also excluded.The authors then select specific moments and controversies during the four centuries covered by their study, seeking always to place them in their specific cultural and intellectual context. The history is thus neither linear nor national—for many controversies transcend borders. It can be viewed as a series of independent intellectual moments: each conveys its own epistemology and conceptualization of the relationship between the economy, society, and nature; each embodies an alternative to the Western instrumental view of the environment; and each involves specific disciplines in relation with political economy—natural history, chemistry, biology, and so on. For instance, chapter 1 is devoted to the relationship between natural history and the emergence of economics, mainly in the eighteenth century. It describes Carl Linnaeus's work and his taxonomy of the natural world, and it presents his “economy of nature,” which for him was a way to understand the natural order but also to develop applications—to improve agriculture or acclimatize exotic plants—intended to boost Swedish economic prosperity. This chapter also describes the work of another great natural historian, George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, whose natural history influenced the emerging political economy in France, as exemplified by the school of the physiocrats. More broadly, the French political authorities and naturalists sought to enhance the economic applications of natural history, not only in agriculture but also in mining and even the textile industry. Beyond this rather instrumental view, however, the Jardin du Roi, the king's botanical garden, also developed as a major field of natural science experimentation, and it was also considered as a utopian prototype of the potential relationship between humans and nature to be emulated at the national level.In the same way, each chapter explores its own specific moment. Chapter 2 studies German ideas on the role of energy and natural resources in the prosperity of nations, through for instance Johann von Goethe's and Alexander von Humboldt's attempts to mix natural sciences and political economy. Chapter 3 switches to chemistry and shows how, in the nineteenth century, liberal and social reformers, relying for instance on Antoine Lavoisier's or Jean-Antoine Chaptal's work, considered that the agricultural and industrial economy could be based on chemical processes, leading to innovative proposals for reforming economic institutions. Chapters 4 and 9 move to Russia, first to tsarist Russia, where an ecological utopianism, combining agronomy and ecology with political and economic thought, was built in response to the agrarian reforms of Alexander II; next, to the Soviet context, studying the way Soviet policies in the early twentieth century articulated ecology and economic planning. Chapter 5 adopts a more classical approach, dealing with social energetics, an already well-documented subject of ecological economics, but focusing on lesser-known works, especially Eduard Sacher's and Wilhelm Ostwald's. Chapters 6 and 9 are devoted to the United States: first, to the conservation movement in the early twentieth century, with a specific and original focus on attempts to build an economic ornithology; second, to the land economics movement of the 1920s–40s and to George Wehrwein's and Aldo Leopold's promotion of the integration of ecology into economics. Chapter 7 investigates the “other Austrian economics” of Joseph Popper-Lynkeus and Otto Neurath. While Neurath's work on the incommensurability of nature, another privileged issue of ecological economics, is already well documented, the chapter also focuses on attempts to express the satisfaction of basic needs in physiological terms. Chapter 8 switches to the relationship between evolutionary biology and economics.Every chapter is consistent and raises its own stakes and controversies. But these various moments cannot easily be compared—for instance, eighteenth-century French botanists have little in common with twentieth-century American conservationists. As acknowledged by the authors, “[Their] historical account takes the form of vignettes with stand-alone insights” (8). Except that they fall within the scope of ecological economic thought as previously defined, the ensemble of these moments hardly amounts to a unified history; it rather draws a kind of pointillist painting. In other words, each moment carries its own common ontology and epistemology of the social and natural world, but none is common to all. As a consequence, each chapter can be read independently, and readers can easily choose the moment that interests them the most. The strength of the book is to provide, for every chapter and every topic, an original and contextualized analysis that highlights attempts to build new bridges between political economy and the natural sciences.