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In Defence of Abundance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Philippe Van Parijs
Philippe Van Parijs*
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium
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Extract

Every single day, every newspaper in the world carries some further evidence as to how limited the Earth’s resources are. Every single day, therefore, we should grow more deeply convinced that the notion of abundance has become hopelessly irrelevant and can safely be shelved forever. Or so it seems. In the final section of this paper, I shall defend the opposite view: that growing awareness of the limits of our resources should make the notion of abundance, suitably (though still plausibly) defined, more and not less relevant to our pursuits. Whether or not this defence turns out to be successful, I hope this paper will go some way towards clarifying this notoriously elusive notion, as well as its no less elusive and no less important antonym: scarcity.

Type
IV Historical Materialism and Ideology
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 15: Analyzing Marxism , 1989 , pp. 467 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1992

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Footnotes

*

This is a much revised version of a paper discussed at the Universities of Amsterdam and Louvain-la-Neuve in May and November 1985. I am very grateful to Philippe Mongin, Alec Nove, Roald Ramer, Gérard Roland, Ian Steedman, Robert van der Veen and Bob Ware, for having helped me out of some of the confusions contained in earlier versions. Conversations with Hans Achterhuis, Ivan Illich, Riccardo Cappi and Marc Germain have drawn my attention to neglected dimensions, which I am sure I have not incorporated to anything like their satisfaction. I have been greatly exercised by a number of earlier treatments of these issues, especially by Tartarin (1981), Nove (1983, ch.1), Phelps (1985, ch.1) and Roland (1989, ch.1). It is because these have not left me fully satisfied that I felt I wanted to have a go at it myself. Without them, however, my job would have been far tougher, and the end result far rougher.

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