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Oeconomy and Ecology in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peter Remien
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Abstract

The conceptual foundations of ecology were laid in the seventeenth century by the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, when he developed the idea of “the oeconomy of nature.” Digby transformed the practical agrarian discourse of “natural oeconomy” (household management), which links human beings to their environments, into the natural-philosophical concept of the oeconomy of nature. Using the oeconomic values of thrift, regularity, and efficient dispensation to conceptualize natural processes, Digby projected a human institution, with all its ideological baggage, onto the natural world. But, for Digby, closely observing nonhuman creatures in the framework of oeconomy opened up the more radical possibility of a decentered system, in which each creature is a potential householder, each the center of its own oeconomy of nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 5 , October 2017 , pp. 1117 - 1133
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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