Affluence and Freedom by Pierre Charbonnier is an ambitious book aiming to provide a broad and systematic reflection on modern political thought from an environmental perspective. In particular, it is the ‘radical singularity’ (p. 241) of the climate crisis which determines the book’s content and methodology. The already-there consequences—the biodiversity extinction, the collapse of other ecosystems, the weather extremes and related human crises of displacement, drought, and flooding—explode, as Charbonnier puts it, ‘all strata of modern political reflexivity,’ forcing us to redefine our categories of political thought. Climate change is a product of the economic, technological, and political development of the past two centuries. It is a ‘historic present’ and a ‘heritage to bear’ (p. 241) resulting from our very own modernity its far-reaching human impact on the natural world it brought about.

Charbonnier sets out to tell a comprehensive history of modern political thought from the perspective of the forms of subsistence, control over land and territory, labor organization, and the design of the technosphere. Such a history is indeed long overdue and unique in scope. He brings into conversation diverse thinkers who are not usually involved in such a genealogical critique of the present or not related to one another—French physiocrats are linked to classical economists, Proudhon and Durkheim, Guizot and Jevons, Saint-Simon and Veblen are brought into a conversation. In terms of the format, the book can perhaps be compared to Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019)—a book in which a very diverse pool of writers and philosophers are interrogated about what it means to be free in a finite human life in fragile and vulnerable environment.

The organizing logic is the environmental history of modernity’s political ideas. The central focus lies on the twin concepts of autonomy and affluence. According to Charbonnier, these conjoined ideals explain the political history of our relationship with nature. It is their alliance which is behind the ‘ecological reason’—an attitude which treats nature as something external and independent, as an available, quantifiable, usable material resource to be subjugated and exploited without subjecting these practices to our sense of justice. Ecological reason is modernity’s greatest paradox—while this era is a distinctively technological and material phenomenon of far-reaching and consequential transformative arrangements of the natural world, its politics has focused exclusively on the immaterial sphere of humans and their rights.

The critique of ecological reason is pursued as a thoroughgoing look into all corners of political reflexivity. The first part, called ‘preindustrial modernity,’ takes us through the work of Locke and Grotius and their ideas about property in land and territory based on practices of agricultural improvement, political control, and war-making. There are also chapters reflecting critically on French Physiocrats and English classical economists and their arguments for the market, commerce, with the division of labor as the best mechanisms to ensure freedom and economic prosperity. It is at this stage, Charbonnier argues, in which a so-called liberal pact between autonomy and affluence emerged, to be reinforced during the phase of the ‘industrial modernity’ and capitalism of the 19th century. This part considers the work of thinkers such as Guizot, Jevons, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Marx, Durkheim, Veblen, and Polanyi. Unconventionally, Tocqueville is invoked as one of the most explicit proponents of what is called an ‘extractive concept of liberty’ which links the possibilities of individual and collective autonomy to control over natural wealth. Remarkable are reflections on socialist thought and how its critical accounts of the destructive effects of free markets and mass production have not been translated into demands for justice arising from the disruption of relations with the land and have failed to provide alternative visions of the relationship between people and material things.

The last part of the intellectual history looks at the 20th century’s ‘great acceleration’ and how its critical thought eclipsed material reflexivity on the ecological consequences of the technopolitical arrangements propping up this age of oil and atomic power. Taking Marcuse to the stage, Charbonnier argues that critical theorists conceived of human relationships to the natural world as abstract and irrelevant, further pushing the conceptions of freedom and autonomy away from the realm of material necessity and thus making autonomy dependent on the extraction of resources.

In all three stages of political reflexivity, Charbonnier also identifies skeptical voices. For early modernity, Fichte is the critic of an extraordinary ecological and geographic misjudgment which props up the idea of intensive growth and its dependence on colonization. For the industrial and free market age, Polanyi’s critique of the commodification of the land is highlighted. For the postwar era, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Ulrich Beck express discontent with the sustainability of growth and the ability to manage ecological risks.

Next comes the climate crisis, our shared historical present. Climate crisis bursts open the unquestioned and precarious connection between affluence and autonomy which caused what is now called by Charbonnier a ‘twofold exception’ of modernity (p. 209)—the asymmetry between the spheres of the natural and the social, and between worlds categorized as modern and worlds deemed underdeveloped or uncivilized. Putting an end to this twofold exception requires a ‘symmetrical subversion’ (p. 210)—the symmetrification of relations of inequality within and between societies and the de-instrumentalization of relations to nature. To show that it is possible, in theory at least, Charbonnier invokes several schools of thought—the anthropology of nature, environmental history, and subaltern and postcolonial historiography. In the last chapter, Charbonnier gestures toward what can replace these approaches—the redefinition of liberty in a finite world, the incorporation of non-human entities into collective subjects and extending claims of justice to them, and the replacement of property with the commons.

The scope of Charbonnier’s book is impressive and comprehensive. Despite the common ‘material’ thread which makes this history of ideas cohere, the book could still use a much more precise analytical frame. Most problematic is the lack of conceptual clarity concerning the key concepts of autonomy and affluence. Both remain elusive, imprecise, and too abstract, disconnected from the real political conflict over their meaning.

Freedom seems to refer to both individual liberty and collective autonomy, both negative and positive liberty, both liberal and egalitarian democratic—all at once. Affluence is even less precisely defined (there is a vague reference to ‘access to prosperity’ on p. 23). Does affluence mean economic growth? Or development? Does it mean the ability to get richer or the imperative to lift people from poverty? Whose affluence, compared to which standard, is at stake? As these simple questions suggest, these concepts can hardly be analyzed as abstract categories or empty placeholders solely in an intellectual discourse, especially when one promises to write freedom’s material history of the present ecological crisis.

Both freedom and affluence have been subject to contestation over their content and distribution. This conflict can indeed be identified as the core of the global history of modernity, or, to be more precise, of multiple modernities. Charbonnier recognizes that western ideals of freedom and affluence have been embedded in the colonial order of political domination and economic exploitation of non-European others. This conflict has its irreducible domestic dimension as well. A class-based conflict has raged within western societies over the distribution of wealth, resources, privileges, and rights, and over the political and economic inequalities stemming from systemic exclusion, marginalization, or downright discrimination against certain groups. Now, as before, affluence has been a privilege of some to be maintained and protected against redistributive claims. Affluence can hardly be seen as a homogeneous collective ideal or an uncontested one. Seen from the perspective of internal conflict, it is implausible to infer that the excluded, exploited, and the marginalized and their aspirations for more freedom and affluence are to be made accountable for the current ordeal of the climate crisis.

This brings me to the last point concerning the obviously limited ability of intellectual history to explain how and why we ended up in the current collapse. Climate crisis is not a result of an abstract alliance of freedom and affluence, but an outcome of very concrete institutions, developments, and actors and their actions. The accurate history of the present is to be located in the postwar period; it has to look at the production of knowledge about climate and its suppression, at the structure of collective rights to natural resources held by states, the depoliticization of the conflict over how to use them, which is a result of the fact that most fossil fuel-rich countries are not constitutional democracies, as much as it is a result of the operation of global legal and financial regimes and institutions. It is also the result of the operation of global fossil capital and how it ensures the ongoing extraction, trade, and use of fossil fuels. Much less than intellectual history, the real material history of the climate crisis is a history of economic, technological, and political development. It can be told as a history of the struggles over the meaning and the distribution of freedom and affluence within and among societies but not primarily as the way these two ideals were abstractly configured and reconfigured in the work of western political theorists.