Rule of nature or rule of capital? Physiocracy, ecological economics, and ideology

Abstract

This century has not been kind to mainstream economics. It has failed to notice the planet is burning. An anti-ecological discipline, it pays scant attention to natural limits. If its moments of 'peak prometheanism' were achieved in the 1980s, in this essay I ask how far back does the rot go? Some ecological economists locate the wrong turn in the nineteenth century. Before that was physiocracy-the name means 'rule of nature.' The physiocrats were the first to call themselves 'economists' and are often credited as founders of the discipline. They were the first to formalise political economy as an objective science tasked to anatomise general economic laws. Could the physiocrats represent the foundation of a genuinely 'ecological' tradition of economics? In the bulk of the essay I subject physiocracy to critical analysis, with a focus on its relationship to agrarian capitalism and laissez-faire economics, and with attention, in addition, to social class, colonialism, environmentalism, and the growth paradigm. I ask whether physiocracy was science masquerading as mysticism or the reverse. The essay concludes with reflections on the ideological character of the discipline of economics and the limits of 'image-focused' alternatives such as Kate Raworth's 'doughnut economics.'

The Dasgupta Review deconstructed: an exposé of biodiversity economics

“…This trend is something that has been repeatedly noted in Globalizations (e.g. Dale, 2020;Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017;Gills & Morgan, 2019;Spash, 2021aSpash, , 2021bStevenson, 2021), and of which its readers should be aware.…”

Economics and climate emergency

“…The issue of biophysical limits also informs Gareth Dale's essay (Dale, 2020). Paralleling Spash, Dale ties together theory which fails to consider the fundamental structural tendencies of economic systems, Raworth's position and a longer history of economic thought beginning with the Physiocrats (Dale, 2020). The fundamental problem of material growth associated with economic growth and critique of growthism also lies behind the degrowth movement.…”

Key challenges to the corporate biosphere stewardship research program: inequity, reification, and stakeholder commensurability

“…This conceptual approach risks reifying corporate power and naturalizing social hierarchies (Dale, 2021). That is to say, it essentially turns a socially constructed phenomenon, a corporation, into the equivalent of a biophysical one, an organism, as a basis for broader sustainability.…”