ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of abundance, that is the conceptual twin of scarcity, via the nineteenth-century authors as Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Ruskin. The voices of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris united over the course of the nineteenth century in a dissonent chorus of Romantic protest against that unfulfilled promise. Unlike their progressivist contemporaries, J. S. Mill and Karl Marx, the Romantic radicals rejected the notion of historical necessity that justified scarcity in the present in the hope of abundance in the future, but they did not reject the notion of abundance itself. Instead, they sought to alter the metaphors through which society and history were understood, and in so doing to alter the actions of men and women, resulting in a fundamentally transformed society in which abundance would be realized immediately.
