ABSTRACT
How did climate change become an issue of partisan politics? Why does resistance to measures to protect the natural environment seem concentrated on the political right? Answering these questions requires understanding the historical relationship between economic growth, national identity, and many of the social goods we equate with liberty in the modern world. Ernest Gellner theorized that the nation evolved as the globally dominant basis of social identity and political legitimacy due to its compatibility to norms integral to the maintenance of a growth economy. What will happen, then, if economies must transform away from the growth model? The Anthropocene confronts us with the reality that continuous economic growth cannot be maintained indefinitely in the finite space that is our biosphere, nor is it necessarily desirable even if it could. Reverse-engineering modernist theories of the origins of nations and nationalism shows how transition to a global “steady-state” economy could mean the decline of the nation. And while many might praise such a development as progressive, these theories also point to principles we could stand to lose in that event, from democracy and popular sovereignty, to literacy and mass education, to human equality and social mobility.
