To those interested in European politics, it has not gone unnoticed that the traditional “leftist” parties are undergoing a period of doubt and evolution. England's Labour Party was transformed into the more economically liberal New Labour by Tony Blair ten years ago. It was feared at the time that Labour was turning its back on its true origins and thus betraying the workers of past ages who had longed for such a party to come to power.Footnote ¹ In France, the Left went through its third consecutive defeat in a presidential election in May 2007 and was defeated in the general elections for a second time in a row a couple of weeks later. All the party elites are trying to find a means to “modernize” the French Socialist party in order to enable it to cope with the new realities of the twenty-first century—especially with the issues of economic growth, trade and globalization, and their corollaries of global warming and social inequalities caused by the growing use of oil in transportation and by the search for ever cheaper labor abroad.

Another, yet little organized, movement calls for the economic and social questions to be viewed in the broader light of globalization and the threats it represents for the environment: the movement for décroissance, which could be translated as de-growth (a voluntary decrease in GDP, as opposed to classical economics based on continuous growth). More strongly anchored to the Left than the mainstream Socialist Party due to its antiliberal views, and more ecologically-conscious than the mainstream far left, the champions of décroissance appear the most determined to propose a consistent system that would answer the ongoing environmental and social crises. Their main argument is that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Interesting and holistic though this movement is, it still appears utopian in the contemporary world. As a student of eighteenth-century utopias, I cannot but notice the connection between the aspirations of contemporary partisans of décroissance, who promote the utopia of éco-villages (ecological villages) and the ideal of natural life in small non-urban human communities that was depicted in literary utopias or in projects of ideal communities two centuries ago. My guides in this study will be called Mandeville, Rousseau, Godwin, and Smith on the one hand (with some backing from utopists such as Thomas More and George Ellis), and the contemporary figures of current French politics as well as the less-known promoters of décroissance like Serge Latouche.Footnote ² Latouche is a French emeritus professor of economics, born in 1940, who argues that economic development as it has been defined and understood for the past few centuries is the cause of, rather than a solution to, worldwide problems of poverty and inequality. Though little-known to the wider public, Latouche is a spearheading figure in contemporary leftist thought on degrowth economics and regularly contributes to the far-left weekly Le Monde Diplomatique. Décroissants formed a political party (the Party for Degrowth—Parti pour la Décroissance) in April 2006 but had no candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Some of their ideas were taken up and promoted by José Bové and his Peasants' Confederation (Confédération Paysanne) and famously involved in many anti-liberal demonstrations in France and abroad.

According to the Décroissants, who also like to define themselves as objectors to growth,Footnote ³ the dogma according to which economic growth naturally/necessarily engenders economic and social benefits is simply a myth. They believe, on the contrary, that it enhances the destruction of social and moral awareness instead of fostering a comfortable life and more humane relationships. Many social philosophers of the eighteenth century already insisted on the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor in industrializing Europe, just as contemporary social thinkers blow the whistle to attract public attention to the living conditions of unskilled workers all over the world and especially to the exploitation of the weakest in the newly industrial (“developing”) countries.

I would argue that the crux of the problem now as then is precisely that of “development” (though the word is a contemporary one), based on the consumption of luxury goods. The notion of development obviously has to do not only with capitalism, economic growth, and industrialization but with a cultural and almost philosophical or anthropological dimension. Latouche and his disciples tend to resent the western ethnocentrism that discriminates between developed (i.e. western) and developing areas, thus annihilating cultural differences around the world by encouraging all countries to fashion themselves into consumer societies.

I hope to demonstrate that left-wing (décroissant) answers to society's pursuit of vanitas vanitatis (to borrow a biblical phrase that would have been most familiar to eighteenth-century Christian moralists) are echoes of Rousseau's idealism as presented in his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité entre les hommes (1753), or of William Godwin's optimism as expressed in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1796). Both these philosophers seem to take up Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) as their ancestor and enemy as they reflect on the desirability of the pursuit of luxury, either as a factor of employment or as a factor of alienation. And, as I shall demonstrate, this famous fable is absolutely relevant today in the ongoing debate over economic growth. The factual and ethical arguments on both sides have, however, changed in the interval. Although I shall focus on pre-Marxist writers only, it must be emphasized that the debate over the legitimacy of development was to be found in socialist writings of the later nineteenth century. Famous utopists William Morris and Edward Bellamy held different views regarding the possibility of enjoying more comfort. A British pre-Raphalite, Morris took preindustrial Britain as his model for an ideal society, whereas the American Bellamy included all comforts of modern life made possible by the industrial revolution (and many more that would not be invented for many decades) into his dream future society. This discrepancy between Morris and Bellamy is still to be found between various contemporary left-wing movements insofar as many Marxist parties do not oppose development as such, but only the social consequences and growing polarization that resulted from the industrial revolution. Those who support simple living (another possible translation of décroissance), on the other hand, share the same ambition of reducing inequalities within Western countries and in the wider world as they hope to go back to a more natural way of life based on reduced consumption and comfort.

Sacralization of Consumption and its Criticism

The most patent element that the proponents of décroissance point out as the cause of social and environmental evil around the globe is overconsumption. What makes the issue of development versus décroissance even more acute nowadays is a new sense of emergency and imminent danger that reinforces the moralizing tone and the deep sense of mission of environmental whistle-blowers. Godwin and Rousseau were thinkers in the image of their time, who were interested in all matters relating to human life as a whole. They made the issue of luxury (which we might nowadays rephrase as overconsumption) part and parcel of their questioning of human nature; the social and economic elements of their thought therefore mirrored their hopes and fears regarding the development of a market economy. Defining luxury or discriminating between consumption and overconsumption is a difficult and quite subjective issue—and an old one. Utopists, from Thomas More onward, encouraged a natural way of life based on the consumption of local resources (plentiful in utopian climates) and on a limitation of individual needs to basic food and shelter. Overconsumption shares the negative connotation associated with luxury in past centuries, especially as it can be defined by comparing standards of living in different areas of the world: if all the inhabitants of the globe lived by European standards, three planets would be needed to provide for them—nine if all were to adopt the Californian way of life. If, on the other hand, all the world's population lived like the inhabitants of Mali, only one-tenth of a planet would be needed.

Godwin and Rousseau both traced all human distress to the institution of private property that appears as the first distinctive trait of a civil society and as the original cause of war (a long philosophical tradition from Hobbes to Marx). We find Rousseau's influence on William Godwin, who declares that human longing for distinction turned legitimate appropriation of the fruits of man's laborFootnote ⁴ into the illegitimate desire to accumulate luxury goods in order to stand out among the crowd. Christopher Berry usefully reminds contemporary readers of Mandeville's definition of luxury, which can be used as a guide to both sides of the debate: luxury, he said, is “everything not immediately necessary to make Man subsist as a living Creature.” Berry adds the following commentary:

Eighteenth-century philosophers tend to agree on the idea that distinction is natural among men. Some are more industrious, and others are more virtuous or more serviceable and therefore gain legitimate regard through their benevolent behavior. Godwin emphasizes that what some can accumulate for their own pleasure and comfort is produced by sweating multitudes, either in England in the newly-born industrial manufactures or abroad at a time when slavery was still commonplace. Let us notice, however, that he does discriminate between things necessary to human life and luxurious items that bear a very different moral value. As a philosopher of the Enlightenment, he unsurprisingly appeals to reason—most of his readers obviously belonged the the upper, educated classes and were thus supposed to be reasonable enough to understand his argument and reform their manners. This appeal to reason is a common feature of most eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century utopias in which narrators try to convince their characters (and therefore their readers) that they need to accept a deep change within their own human nature in order to be less self-centered and more interested in the fate of the community—by recognizing that the common well-being secures their own happiness. This is the utopists' main challenge, changing the very nature of selfish human beings:

The proponents of décroissance aim to demonstrate that all the disruption in the world could be, if not solved, at least alleviated by converting to a new way of living that renounces a perpetual thirst for artificial and material riches that are produced by a low-paid (or even unpaid) Chinese or Indian labor force which thus creates unbearable social and economic disparities among the developed and the developing populations. Furthermore, the fact that these goods are imported by fuel-consuming devices contributes to the global disruption of climate and creates ever more waste. Even though the recognition of universal human rights has made slavery officially illegal, many contemporary intellectuals point to the global inequalities in living and working conditions to denounce the dire situation most of the world's inhabitants live in so that others may enjoy ever more refined “superfluities.” Serge Latouche further insists on the growing discrepancies as “the gap between the richest and the poorest inhabitants of the globe, from 1 to 30 in 1960, has skyrocketed to 1 to 150 in 1990.”Footnote ⁷ Believers in décroissance advocate a reduction of consumption in western nations as a means to restore the balance between “obese” countries and the southern “developing” part of the globe, a means to allow them to benefit from modern comforts without further endangering the environment.

The debate over the usefulness of commerce and economic growth is not a new one. What Adam Smith identified as the “invisible hand” (now baptized as the “trickle-down effect”) discreetly guiding the distribution of goods among all human beings, (or at least among all Britons in the late eighteenth century) is now the motto of contemporary economic liberalism. Though Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, did not go so far as Mandeville's formula, “private vices, public benefits,” and the “invisible hand” can be seen as the “vice” of vanity that enhances the desire to stand out of the crowd. Polemical though Mandeville's statement was, however, Christopher Berry emphasizes that the Fable‘s subtitle did not point to public virtue, but to public benefits, i.e., national wealth and expansion.Footnote ⁸ Now as then the emblem of this thirst for ever-growing consumption is to be found in the succession of fashions. Mandeville already described this phenomenon as the economic engine of eighteenth-century society in his Fable:

Eighteenth-century philosophers such as Montesquieu and many others defined trade as a “doux commerce,” an intercourse that was not based on military power but on the peaceful exchange of goods and culture and therefore led to greater tolerance and understanding between people and peoples; it was thus a means to end to all conflicts. Adam Smith himself considered that, in modern society, all men were merchants and that their daily intercourse with others would teach them benevolence.Footnote ¹⁰ Serge Latouche defines contemporary “hyperglobalization” as a “global economic war,”Footnote ¹¹ just as eighteenth-century radicals denounced mercantilism as economic competition eventually resulting in military conflicts. Latouche's subtitle (“decolonization of our imagination”) can itself be compared to the ideal of Enlightenment philosophers: what the décroissant means is quite similar to Voltaire's desire to “crush the loathsome superstition” of fanaticism, even more so since the extreme left would-be reformers insist that consumption and overconsumption have become the new religion of our time, or, in Marxist terms, contemporary “opium.”

Humane reasons are therefore the first basis of the critique of consumption and overconsumption as luxury—what human beings consume beyond their real needs, a definition common to eighteenth- and twenty-first-century thinkers. I would therefore argue that today's advocates of décroissance, like Godwin in his day, are attempting to reconcile economics, politics, and ethics. The champions of consumption, whether now or two centuries ago, seem to believe that it is the only way of providing employment for all the inhabitants of a given country, and this, at a time when unemployment appears as the key social issue. Soldiers back from eighteenth-century wars and peasants driven out of their small estates by enclosures had to be employed in order to find a legitimate place in civil society—just as today's unemployment is identified as the first cause of poverty in most parts of the “civilized,” “developed,” or “post-industrial” world. More production is therefore necessary to support a growing population, and more production is useless if there is not more consumption to absorb it.Footnote ¹² Consumption is so important in our everyday life that it is measured by polling institutes in order to determine the morale of French households. Happy people, it is argued, tend to be more confident in their country and therefore more inclined to spend than to put money aside.

They also emphasize the idea that luxury is limitless. This is a recurring feature of the debate over luxury. Christopher Berry gives the following explanation for the development of luxury: “Since it is in principle never possible to give a complete description—it is always possible to add another adjective to qualify an existing qualification—then the process of refinement is itself in principle infinite.”Footnote ¹³Décroissants denounce the fact that contemporary society believes in the inalienable right of property and of consumption for its own sake, leading to the need to need, or the desire to desire rather than the desire to satisfy a specific want. They resent consumer society because it glorifies riches for their own sake, condemning the lower classes to long to imitate the upper ones and to acquire whatever it is that might enhance their social status from outside.Footnote ¹⁴

In Praise of Frugality: A Revolution in Consumption, Life, and Education

Godwin and Rousseau, like today's décroissants, do not advocate a distribution of infinite wealth among the members of society. Instead, they call for a voluntary renunciation of “obese” finances (whether national or individual) and a reduction in the pursuit of material goods that would consequently lead to a reduced exploitation of today's proletarians, whether in our western countries or in the “third world.” The champions of décroissance would undoubtedly agree with Godwin's idea that in that new system of production and consumption, man is totally dispossessed, alienated even from himself—once more an idea that has been abundantly discussed by socialists over the past two centuries. Locke first demonstrated that each man has a right to enjoy the fruits of his own labor and that it is a legitimate claim to property. Nowadays, however, more than in Godwin's and Smith's time, each individual is dependent on the labor of thousands in everyday life.

This quotation could easily be transposed in today's world without any change at all—but with perhaps one addition regarding the environmental imprint of man's consumption. Godwin already proposed the renunciation of luxury as the only way to better society. He advocated frugality over luxury, equality over the thirst for distinction, and moderate labor over exploitation of a majority in the belief that instituting equality of social status, demonstrated by an equal simplicity in dress, food, and housing, would lead to a complete revolution in ways of life. François Brune (a French writer who regularly contributes to far-left and anti-consumerist papers and campaigns), in a talk on shared well-being, also advocated a rejection of our contemporary luxury as embodied by overconsumption. As a first measure to fight this superficial way of life, he advocated replacing the word “progress,” especially in economic terms, with the term “immobility.” Addressing his audience, he added, “[I]f that is too static for your liking, then let us back-pedal.”Footnote ¹⁶ The true way out, according to Brune, is “frugality.” Here is his definition:

Here again, décroissants agree with Godwin's theory that nothing can be achieved without a proper education of the people:

“Objecteurs de croissance,” as I already suggested, plead for a total revolution in thought, one that would require the same phase of enlightenment as existed in the eighteenth century—some among the most pessimistic argue that it will one day become inevitable and that it would be wiser to adopt it gradually and voluntarily rather than have to undergo dramatic changes unprepared. Without this conscience-raising (this Enlightenment), décroissance could only be established through a dictatorship, as Catherine Tarral humourously explains:

Both Rousseau in his time and décroissants today are well aware that once a human group has turned into a consumer society, it cannot be brought back to its former situation (the very existence of this “state of nature” itself is rather a theoretical construct inherited from seventeenth- and eighteenth- century jusnaturalists than an actual historical stage). In Latouche's words: “We have to give up this mad race towards ever growing consumption. Not only is this essential to avoid the final destruction of our earthly environment, but it is the only way out of psychological and moral misery for our contemporaries.”Footnote ²⁰ Like Godwin and Rousseau, he uses reason and education as the main argument for a change in individual consumption habits. Regarding the notion of education, it is interesting to note that the éco-villages only gather a few families (“villages” of no more than two thousand people, for example), which ensures the coherence of their objectives. Eighteenth-century philosophers expressed the same desire for small groups as they feared the influence of too big a community, often turning into a too easily manipulated “mob.” Godwin therefore considered that his frugal revolution would take place gradually and under the influence of small communities: “Popular commotion is like the waters of the earth, capable where the surface is large, of producing the most tragical effects, but mild and innocuous when confined to the circuit of a humble lake. Sobriety and equity are the obvious characteristics of a limited circle.”Footnote ²¹

Éco-villages are a modern version of small utopian cities as they could be found in previous centuries. They are based on the same model of a small human community living in an eco-friendly home and cultivating their kitchen garden and nearby agricultural or other resources. Local production is a way of limiting or avoiding fuel-consuming (and therefore polluting) transportation of foreign and often superfluous goods. If it were adopted in the western world, that frugal way of life would, ideally, ease the problem of global warming, now almost universally acknowledged to be a consequence of human industrial activities. Éco-villages would be one element in a wider social framework based on quality human relationship rather than quantity of consumed goods. Serge Latouche calls this new, desirable way of life “convivial utopia.”Footnote ²² Frugality used to be a religious or ethical issue, but it has now become a matter of life and death, décroissants argue. So much so that contemporary anthropologists and ethnologists are once more turning their attention to the few remaining natural tribes as a model for a truly humane society. Among many examples, a recent article published in the French weekly Courrier International was entitled “Ces peuples sans malades mentaux”(“These peoples free of mental illness”). It exposed the conclusions of Spanish anthropologist Fracisco Diner Abati who declared as he came back from a trip to the remotest tribes of Africa:

This is precisely what the partisans of décroissance have in mind when they denounce the ethnocentricism of our western societies as they try and impose their cultural model of market economy and consumption societies on the rest of the world. What distinguishes their natural way of life from ours is precisely the way in which they discriminate between the necessary and the superfluous. In this way the representation of these remote societies definitely echoes Rousseau's description of mankind in a state of nature, as careless about accumulation and appropriation because “foresight was meaningless to them, and far from worrying about a distant future, they did not even think about the very next day.”Footnote ²⁴ The utopian way back to a natural way of life therefore appears as the longing of today's décroissants and of eighteenth-century philosophers afraid of the rise of the consumption society they foresaw in their time of industrialization.

Décroissance: Today's Utopia?

Godwin, as well as his heirs, calls upon the reason of those who live in ease to accept a reduction in their unnecessary comforts in order to share the benefits of development in a more equal way both within northern countries and between the North and South. It comes as no surprise that they are often ridiculed as utopists—which is not new either. I shall show here that décroissance has been part and parcel of utopian schemes.

In Mandeville's Fable, once the bees have all become honest, benevolent and distinterested, satisfied with a state of frugal equality, they become less industrious than when they had to produce all sorts of luxuries and their economic power over the world decreases. This weakening makes them an easy prey for the neighboring hives that have not taken the same path. Though they valiantly win this battle, many are destroyed in the war, and the character of the remaining bees changes completely:

This depiction of the state of virtue, supposedly copied from the state of nature vindicated by many political radicals is indeed close to what was already advocated by Thomas More in his original Utopia published in 1516. None of the inhabitants of the happy island were supposed to own anything, not even their house or the land they cultivated. Nor were they allowed to remain idle. Anything that appeared a luxury would be laughed at in this perfect state of reason and virtue: gold and jewels are used for distinction in More's Utopia as the attributes of bondsmen or of “infamed” people. Hierarchies are reversed in this utopia as in medieval carnival. Gold is the vile material, as it serves no useful purpose, unlike iron or earthen vessels that are most serviceable. Quite interestingly, More introduces what Godwin would later take up in his Essay on Political Justice, as he uses reason and shame to convince the Utopians to give up the distinction gold creates in non-utopian civilized countries. One may say that their philosophy is that those who live by vanity shall perish by vanity:

What Godwin proposes is the literal enactment, thanks to reason, of the Utopian way of life as defined by Thomas More—a pattern that was then taken up by most of his heirs in the field of utopian literature. It bears obvious similarities to the ideal now championed by the décroissance movement. The following description of an éco-village and the ideology guiding its establishment perfectly fits the description of utopian communities of the past:

The main feature of this utopian way of life is a small community sharing the same ideals, just as it is the case in the “primitive” societies described above. The refusal of trade and imports is an essential trait of the utopias of past centuries. Another key to this self-dependence is to be found in the return to professional activities linked to manual labor such as agriculture—“labor” regaining its etymological meaning—and craftsmanship. Just like More's Utopians who spent only three hours in the fields and three more in their workshops in order to produce all the necessities and conveniences (as distinguished from luxuries) of life, today's décroissants advocate a reduction of needs and therefore of the labor necessary to supply those needs. The philosophical heritage from former utopians is obvious when one compares éco-villages with New Britain (1821), an English literary utopia set in the vast plains of Missouri. This early nineteenth-century tale perfectly translates the depiction of the ideal state of mankind in a truly humane civilization: George Ellis imagines a newly established American colony and stages himself as the main character, an Englishman travelling around the globe in search of true political wisdom and social equality. He introduces the New Britons as “a people in which every man is an agriculturist, and also an useful mechanic or professional man; and yet as careless of accumulation as the savages.”Footnote ²⁸ This simple sentence seems to encapsulate utopian dreams since the eighteenth-century. It binds together the aspirations to equal labor and comfort advocated by Thomas More in the sixteenth century, as well as the simple and healthful life in social and natural harmony championed by Rousseau or Godwin, and finally seems to be a perfect description of the way of life that décroissants are defending. It is even more obvious when we read on to discover the milieu in which they live:

There are no cities as such to be seen, as all inhabitants live in healthful detached homes. This semi-rural environment is an obvious remedy both for unwholesome urban mushrooming cities of the English industrial revolution and for today's inner cities that still symbolize both our western culture and the effects of economic inequality (such as crime and homelessness). It is also consistent with the desire to teach small groups to live in a new situation that could not be imposed on the global national community.

It seems to me very relevant here to quote the “moral” of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, as he expresses the typical argument against frugal utopian schemes:

The reference to utopia is plain enough, as is the judgment he passes on those who would be willing to implement such a virtuous plan. “Vice” here is precisely what was also called “vanity” or desire for distinction. What Mandeville makes clear is that “hives,” or states, share with individuals the same vice of vanity, so that they long for distinction just as much as individuals do. Transposed in contemporary terms, vanity is manifested in the international competition for economic growth, to the point that some contemporary left-wing radicals describe commerce as a new form of war, especially between the North and South. The debate between Serge Latouche, a partisan of décroissance, and Hubert Védrine, former foreign minister in Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's socialist government (1995–2002), is particularly telling as to the complexity of the debate, as shown by the following quotations from the minister's speech:

This excerpt is an excellent example of how governing politicians have to deal with pragmatic issues whereas ideological groups are entitled to propose alternative ideas, utopian though they are. Primitive though this way of life may appear, the partisans of décroissance would agree with former utopians that such a simple way of life would provide human beings with true happiness based on non-material values. It is to be noted, though, that Latouche and degrowth proponents are not denying the right of developing countries to better living conditions. Yet they denounce western cultural hegemony that imposes the same standards and definition of well-being on very different societies. Besides, reducing the western appetite for goods that threaten the environment is expected to set an example for India and China. Here again, we may compare Godwin and some contemporary ethnologists specialized in “primitive” societies: “The genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with a disposition to improve it. All other riches are of petty and inconsiderable value. Is there not a state of society practicable, in which leisure shall be made the inheritance of every one of its members?”Footnote ³² Once more, this assertion can be contrasted, with an ellipsis of two centuries, with the motto of French president Nicolas Sarkozy about more labor being the key to more earnings and therefore greater purchasing power (thus feeding the circle of production, consumption, and expected economic growth), but allowing less time for humane development. This is one of the main arguments of the socialist opposition that implemented a law limiting work hours to thirty-five a week in an attempt to share available employment among the entire population and to give workers more free time to spend on cultural activities or relationships with family and friends.