ABSTRACT
This chapter takes us back in time. After a reminder of the very long (pre)historical period when humans largely lived in a sustainable or renewable mode of subsistence, and with a very low growth rate – the era of limits – the chapter concentrates on the turning point toward the end of the eighteenth century that inaugurates modern economics and the age of growth. Whereas we now rightly recognize this moment as the beginning of industrialization and our reliance on (non-renewable) fossil fuels, the chapter emphasizes the emergence of the anthropological model that provides the new paradigm of economic progress: the Four Stage Theory first formulated by Adam Smith and his French contemporary Turgot. Most striking about this theory is their vision of the fourth and final stage, which they both call Commerce, in counter-distinction to our retrospective understanding of it as the dawn of the industrial age. Before the material and technological means that would enable such unprecedented growth became even imaginable, they conceived of a stage of economic progress that, unlike any previous one, would be without limits because it was not based on any finite mode of production, but rather on a kind of reproduction. For Smith, as for us, a “thriving” economy could only be in a progressive, that is, growing state. It was, as it were, condemned to perpetual growth.
