As a fossil fuel from a world long since disappeared, coal also transformed the perception of time in many respects. Above all, it conferred on the capitalist the freedom to store energy and mobilize it at the desired moment and in the degree needed. Sadi Carnot, writing at the dawn of its use, had perfectly glimpsed the temporal power of the steam engine: ‘It has the inappreciable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption in its work.’15 The steam engine made it possible to homogenize space, to ignore location, watercourses and gradients. It created a much more competitive and fluid labour market, as entrepreneurs could relocate their activities according to local wages. While production had to be adjusted to a moving nature (the strength of horses, the fluctuations of wind and the flow of rivers), coal, because it could be stored and accumulated, made it possible to smooth out production, to linearize time and subject it to market imperatives. The continuous time of industrial capitalism, imposed on recalcitrant workers, was then projected onto cultural representations of the future, conceived as a continuous progress unfurling to the rhythm of productivity gains.
This linear time was likewise projected onto nature by way of the rise of gradualism in geology. This theory, according to which the terrestrial globe was shaped by present causes acting over the very long run (rather than by catastrophic events), was anchored in European culture at the same time as the new centrality of coal.16 Indeed, the Earth had to be given an antiquity sufficient to leave the relics of past vegetation time to accumulate in thick layers, providing for centuries of industrial need.
At the threshold of the Anthropocene, the switch from an organic surface energy to an underground fossil energy widened the gap between the temporality of the Earth and the temporality of human history. In return, this discordance of human and natural times favoured a sense of externality in relation to a nature that was infinitely old and thus immensely rich. From the dawn of time, wrote Sadi Carnot, nature had prepared the ‘immense reservoir’17 from which industry could in future prosper. Jean-Baptiste Say went further: ‘Happily, nature placed in reserve long before the formation of man immense provisions of fuel in coal mines, as it foresaw that man, once in possession of his domain, would destroy more combustible materials than it could reproduce.’18 The geologist and theologian William Buckland saw the providential hand of God in the depth of the coal seams: ‘However remote may have been the periods, at which these materials of future beneficial dispensations were laid up in store, we may fairly assume, that … an ulterior prospective view to the future uses of Man, formed part of the design.’19 Thanks to its antiquity, the Earth, despite the evident finitude of its surface, became an endless reservoir of resources.
This new vision of the Earth’s bounty circulated widely among the Victorian public. For instance, in his Statistical Account of the British Empire, John McCulloch demonstrated in 1839 the unchallengeable superiority of Great Britain and the unshakeable stability of its domination. By lengthy tables, the bourgeois Victorian was relieved to discover fabulous amounts of resources. Coal in particular was described as inexhaustible: ‘The coal fields of Durham and Northumberland are adequate to furnish the present annual supply for more than 1,340 years.’ The precision of this figure, and the vague expression ‘more than’, opened the perspective of an almost infinite quantity.20 In a few decades, geology had thus transformed Malthus’s ‘dismal science’ into a reassuring argument for limitless growth.
But how could atmosphere, vegetation and oceans absorb without damage all the carbon released by the new fossil economy? This concern was not foreign to contemporaries. In 1832, the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage noted that steam engines ‘are constantly increasing the atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid and other gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes these elements, or reconverts them into a solid form, are not sufficiently known.’ But he immediately went on to reassure his readers about the immensity and recycling power of nature ‘incessantly at work in reversing … acting over vast spaces, and unlimited by time’.21 In parallel with Lyell’s idea that human action was insignificant in the history of the Earth, scientists in thrall to natural theology conceived human action as microscopic compared to the vast cycles of nature. Likewise, precise studies conducted by the chemists Dumas and Boussingault in 1841 showed that the composition of the air was uniform across the globe. The result was reassuring:
The combustions or oxidations that are accomplished on the surface of the Earth, all these events that our imagination is pleased to expand … take place as it were unperceived as far as the general composition of the air surrounding us is concerned.22
In the same way, in 1855, the chemist Eugène Péligot calculated that European industry each year injected 80 billion cubic metres of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equivalent to the breathing of 500 million individuals. Even if vegetation could not absorb all this carbon, he argued, ‘however considerable these quantities appear to us, they are in all likelihood nothing in relation to the immensity of our atmosphere’.23 Nature was supposed to guarantee the stability of the atmosphere’s composition, whatever critics (local residents, doctors, workers, etc.) might say about industrial pollutants.24 By universalizing the air into a majestic atmosphere, an immense receptacle in permanent equilibrium, the local and global effects of industry were minimized and nature became a mere externality.
Externalizing natural and human substance
‘Machine production in a commercial society,’ wrote Karl Polanyi, ‘involves, in effect, no less a transformation than that of the natural and human substance of society into commodities’.25 On the threshold of the Anthropocene, two disciplines had the function of justifying this great transformation and its consequences for men and nature.
Political economy, above all, provided the principal justificatory theodicy of industrial miseries. In the 1820s and ’30s, in England, while misery and economic crises led to a general questioning of the benefits of industrialization, and machine breaking was on the rise, economists such as Hugh Torrens, Nassau William Senior, McCulloch, Babbage and William Whewell endowed machines with providential virtues: they countered the fall in productivity and staved off the stationary state predicted by David Ricardo; they increased profit, stimulated investments and created new jobs by replacing those they destroyed; finally, they promoted the moral progress of the workers by freeing them from mind-numbing tasks. Political economy became the great apologetic discourse of the machine.26 It also accompanied the disembedding of work from the norms, institutions and solidarities that had regulated its exercise. By demonstrating its optimality, it absolved the free market of social disturbances. Vulgarizers spread a providentialist view of the economy that condemned any intervention (limiting bread prices, helping the poor financially, etc.) as contrary to the natural order desired by God. The market was conceived as a vast arena in which God spoke directly to all, a ‘great scheme of human redemption’ according to the Tory prime minister Robert Peel.27 In 1826, in a pre-revolutionary context, the theologian and economist Thomas Chalmers recommended political economy as ‘a sedative to all sorts of turbulence and disorder’.28
In France, the anxiolytic project was taken up by a small group of economists and vulgarizers very active in the new engineering schools of the industrial revolution. The most important of these, Jean-Baptiste Say, enriched the English theories with an essential element: the supposed law that ‘supply creates its own demand’. Contrary to the productive world of the ancien régime, preoccupied above all by overproduction and the effects of competition on the quality of products,29 the law of supply, by neglecting the role of money and saving, explained that production itself created its own outlet. In this way, it abolished one of the main motives for corporative regulation and justified an unbridled productivism.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, public health responded to a similar anxiolytic function in justifying the externalit
ies of industrial capitalism: the threat to health from world trade, the biological consequences of pauperism and industrial pollution.
In England, the anti-contagionist doctrine that formed the theoretical basis of the ‘sanitarian’ movement championed the idea that diseases were caused not by transmissible germs (as Koch and Pasteur would later demonstrate) but by dirt and the miasmas it gave off. The debate between contagionism and anti-contagionism opposed two visions of the economy and the role of the state. The former implied maintaining the system of quarantine that industrialists and businessmen wished to have abolished in the name of free exchange. Anti-contagionism absolved commercial globalization and imperialism from the resurgence of the great epidemics (such as cholera) in the first half of the nineteenth century.30
This doctrine also justified the liberalization of the labour market. In the 1830s and ’40s, Edwin Chadwick, a major figure in public health in Britain, undertook to prove that excess mortality in the industrial districts was due not to poverty or hunger, but to dirt. This was the cause of disease which in turn led to poverty, rather than the other way round. The direction of causality defined a policy: in the wake of the reform of the Poor Laws in 1834, which abolished outdoor relief, the point was to exonerate the free labour market from the disastrous biological consequences of poverty. Thanks to the new public health doctrine, the construction of sewers and the reform of individual behaviour was more important than social reform.31
In France, public health in the 1820s and ’30s had a different political role, emphasizing on the contrary the economic causes of mortality so as to downplay the environmental ones, with the aim of legitimizing industrial pollution. French public health policy was born in the context of the industrialization of Paris and the complaints against pollution, with a view to supplanting the environmental medicine of the eighteenth century. Against the town dwellers who demanded the suppression of factories by invoking the circumfusa (or ‘environmental things’), the first public health experts proved that factories could be inconvenient without necessarily being unhealthy. Even better, by studying the social causes of health (after the model of Louis-René Villermé), they showed that not only were factories not unhealthy, they could portend a prosperous society and therefore a healthier population. In this way, public health accompanied and justified a fundamental shift in French environmental regulation. According to the decree of 1810 on classified establishments (which influenced a large part of European legislation on this subject), the administration subjected factories to rigorous authorization procedures but guaranteed in exchange their permanence, no matter what subsequent complaints were made. Local residents, unable to hope for the suppression of a factory, had no other recourse than suing the polluters for compensation in the civil courts. The government and civil justice were two faces of the same free-market regime of environmental regulation: civil justice, by making the polluter pay the costs of pollution, was deemed to produce financial incentives that would lead entrepreneurs to reduce emissions. From a common good, responsible for health and subject to the police of the ancien régime, the environment became an object of financial transactions.
The dematerialization of the economy
Prevailing economic theory maintains a very tenuous relationship with matter. It envisages goods according to their psychological effects, as purveyors of utility, rather than according to their material characteristics. In the same way, capital is not conceived as a concrete set of productive equipment, rather as assets generating financial flows. This dematerialization has the effect of naturalizing the exponential growth of the economy during the Anthropocene by disconnecting it from any material substratum.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, European elites were still largely agricultural, and the aristocracy was suspicious of industrialization. They preferred the economic and social stability of the rural world to an uncontrolled industrial and urban growth. In England, until the 1850s, the dominant Tory ideology was deeply pervaded by an evangelical idea of economics, conceiving poverty, trade crises and bankruptcies as dispensations of providence. The economy was seen as static and cyclical. The market was more a place of moral retribution, penitence and gratification than an instrument of growth.32 For the physiocrats, Malthus and classical political economy alike (Ricardo with his law of diminishing returns), the economic theory of the early industrial period ruled out the idea of indefinite growth. It was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that theorists began to view the economy as an object entirely distinct from natural processes and subject above all, if not uniquely, to human laws and conventions.
Marginalist economists turned away from the study of factors of production (labour, capital and land) and focused on the subjective states of consumers and producers seeking to maximize their individual utility.33 The economy no longer shared an object with the natural sciences (the production of material wealth), but only mathematical tools: the marginalists transposed equations taken from physics so as to create the illusion of a second world as coherent as nature, analogous but external.34 Natural resources now occupied only a very marginal place in economic theory. Between 1870 and 1970, their study formed only a small subdivision of the discipline, the economics of conservation, which took its ontology and mathematical tools from marginalist theory. A dynamic approach to the economy, which envisaged long-term evolution in a context of increasing scarcity (with Jevons for example), was replaced by a microeconomic and static approach. Thus in 1931, in a fundamental article on the economics of natural resources, Harold Hotelling analysed the situation of a mine-owner in a competitive situation who sought to maximize his actualized income. The problem was no longer that of the long-term future of a national economy, but more modestly how a mine-owner could find the optimal path for extracting an exhaustible resource so as to maximize its financial value. The mine became an abstract entity, disconnected from the rest of the productive system (despite fuelling this), simply a reserve of value that obeyed the same type of calculation as a stock portfolio.35
The disembedding of the economy from natural constraints took place also in the study of economic cycles. Until the 1870s, this consisted in analysing the price of commodities in relation to non-economic causes. Climate played a major role, as the importance of agriculture in the economy and the periodicity of business activity suggested a correlation with meteorological data. In the late nineteenth century, however, automatic techniques of price inscription and communication radically accelerated the flow of financial information (the stock ticker appeared at the New York Stock Exchange in 1867). While the old procedures of setting prices showed monthly variations correlated with harvests, weather, natural catastrophes and wars, prices now varied minute by minute. The result of this major transformation was that stock-market quotations now constituted continuous temporal sequences that seemed to vary in an independent manner, unconnected from anything apart from themselves.36 The globalization of financial information and the establishment of futures markets (starting with corn in the 1860s) further disconnected prices from local and natural conditions of production, tying them to financial rather than natural causes.
In the 1890s, econometric tools made it possible to study the systemic relationships between different prices. Instead of correlating these with exogenous factors, the price system made the economy into a homogeneous object closed on itself. ‘External’ causes, whether natural or political, were no more than secondary disturbances to the system. The economy became an autonomous object on which scientific action was possible.
On the macroeconomic side, neoclassical tools such as the production function proposed by Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas in 1928, and the growth theories of Robert Solow, did not allow any place for nature (and its limits), or at best viewed it simply as a production factor that could be substituted for by an increase in capital or by technological innovation. According to Solow, ‘if it is very easy to substitute other factors [e.g., labour or capital] for natural
resources, then there is, in principle, no “problem”. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.’37
In the same way, mainstream Marxists, by focusing on the labour theory of value and the distribution of the product between two classes, workers and capitalists, essentially saw only two factors of production: capital and labour. Whereas Marx and Engels were particularly concerned with the metabolic rupture between Earth and society that capitalism had produced, and certain Marxists such as Podolinsky sought to refound the labour theory on energy, Marxist economic science – until the recent emergence of a fruitful eco-Marxism – abolished the role of metabolism and energy, rejecting as ‘Malthusian’ (and thus conservative) any idea of limits to the planet’s resources.38
The crisis of the 1930s, Keynesianism and the development of systems of national accounting completed the dematerialization of the economy. Before the 1930s, the idea of growth was bound up with a process of material expansion: it was a question of increasing production of a particular material, opening up new resources or new territories. With the overproduction crisis of the 1930s, growth was reconceived not in material terms but as the intensification of economic exchange. The abandonment of the gold standard in that decade (i.e., the end of the idea that bank-notes represented gold) was a key turning-point. Keynes, in a famous passage of his General Theory, explained that the end of coal would be unimportant; what mattered was the correct circulation of money: it would be enough, therefore, for the British Treasury to bury bank-notes and ask miners to hunt for them, in order to ensure employment and economic prosperity.39 During the decades of economic crisis and war, a new object of thinking and government was produced: ‘the economy’ with a definite article, understood as the totality of market transactions on a given territory.40 As such, and completely dematerialized, the economy could be conceived as growing indefinitely, outside any natural determinisms and without coming up against physical limits, thanks to the good guardianship of economic experts (at the international level, the OECD incarnated this growth imperative for the industrial countries).
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