Dr Lucy Ford

While not primarily a social theorist in the classical sense, E.F. Schumacher’s interdisciplinary thought helped galvanise ecological social theory and the ecological movement more broadly. In this article we introduce a special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory dedicated to engaging with E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful on its 50th anniversary. We provide both an overview of his life and work before locating Small is Beautiful within both its contemporary context and within today’s social theoretical literature. As we show, Schumacher was a fierce critic of capitalist modernity and its ‘gigantist’ tendencies. As we discuss below, he advocated a metaphysical turn in economics, the implementation of intermediate technology, and a reorientation of social practices in line with a more ecologically-attuned political economy. 

In this paper we argue that E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful offers important insights for contemporary social theory. In particular, we focus on the merits of his use of 'meta-economics' and of 'scale' as means for advancing ecological social critique today. While we are sympathetic to Schumacher's approach we are mindful of the limitations to his theoretical imagination and commence our paper acknowledging his partsan metaphysics and insensitivty to global political dynamics. To resolve this, we demonstrate that the central critical insights Schumacher provides can be substantially extricated from these problems. Our task here, therefore, is a critical reconstruction of Schumacher's approach to social-ecological critique, which we claim offers the potential to shape contemporary social theory, both within, and beyond, critical political ecology.

We argue that Gorz’s work offers a nuanced engagement with alienation that is instructive for contemporary social theory. In keeping with Gorz’s broader politics, we contend that the utility of his framing of alienation derives from his insistence that progressive critique must challenge the ideal of productivism. We start the paper by presenting a sympathetic reconstruction of Gorz’s understanding of alienation. Next, we explicitly detail the strengths his approach carries for furthering sociological research today. We then reinforce this point by arguing that Gorz’s work offers particularly valuable theoretical resources for contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which the study of alienation has been somehow hampered by the ascent of ‘recognition theory’. While not sharing all the methodological commitments of first-generation Critical Theorists, Gorz was well versed in Frankfurt School scholarship and is therefore an apposite interlocutor to engage ‘third-generation’ Critical Theory. Gorz’s insights are thus shown to be important for furthering contemporary social theory, and in particular, for helping to combat the unsustainable productivism of neoliberal capitalism.

The Global Environmental Politics literature tends to focus on institutional and governance frameworks as the solution to global environmental problems rather than on the systemic constraints that limit the potential effectiveness of governance efforts. Part of the problem with institutional frameworks to reform global environmental governance is insufficient attention paid to deeper structural challenges. We seek to contribute to these debates drawing on critical political ecology understood as a broad, interdisciplinary set of discourses and practices that goes to the roots of structural challenges. In particular, we focus on a broad area of research around degrowth. Usually, critical approaches are considered idealist. However, we argue that value changes are a vital component in the transition to a post-growth, post-capitalist world, which is inevitable given the biophysical and social limits to growth. While degrowth is not by any means on the verge of becoming a new dominant value system, it nevertheless presents both a coherent frame of reference as well as contains concrete examples of alternative ways of organizing society and the economy. Thus it offers important new value sets to the treasure chest of approaches wanting to bring about ecological and social change and thus a potentially important contribution to global environmental politics.