In recent decades environmentalists have directed a persistent ecological critique at economics, contending that economics has failed to value the natural world. Lately economists have begun to respond to this critique, and a rapidly growing sub discipline of environmental economics has emerged that is dedicated to placing economic values on nature and integrating the environment […]
Harry Magdoff 1913—
Harry Magdoff was born on 21 August 1913 in the Bronx in New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father was a housepainter. As a youth he was swept up by the left political culture of his time. By the time he entered the City College of New York, where he commenced studies […]
The Canonization of Environmental Sociology
Environmental sociology first arose, as a distinct subfield of sociology, in the 1970s. The Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association was formally launched almost one quarter of a century ago, in 1976. The rise of the subfield was a direct response to the rapid growth of environmentalism in society at large in […]
Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award
I would like to quote at length from Paul Samuelson, who wrote a piece exactly thirty years ago for Newsweek magazine about a time thirty years before that “when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard”: When Diaghilev revived his ballet company he had the original Bakst sets redone in even more vivid colors, explaining, […]
Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock
In his influential Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the United States, U.S. economist Henry Carey (1858) quoted at length from a talk by an “eminent agriculturist” who had provided rough calculations for the whole United States of the loss of soil nutrients resulting from the failure to recycle organic […]
Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift
This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, […]
Introduction to John Evelyn’s Fumifugium
John Evelyn (1620-1706) is perhaps best known today as one of the greatest diarist of the 17th-century England. He is also remembered, however, as one the figures behind the formation of the Royal Society of London in 1662 and the greatest proponent of conservation in his age. In his Sylva, Or a Discourse of Forest-Trees […]
Is Overcompetition the Problem?
It is tempting perhaps to attribute all the problems of capitalism to excessive competition. After all, capitalism is generally presented within contemporary ideology as a system which is nothing more than a set of competitive relations governed by the market. Is it not possible then that the economic contradictions of capitalism, and indeed the present […]
Contradictions in the Universalization of Capitalism
A central, perhaps the central, idea of economic liberalism has always been that a market society organized on the basis of individual self-interest is the natural state of humankind, and that such a society is bound to prosper—through an almost providential invisible hand—provided that no external barriers stand in its way. In this view all […]
Rebuilding Marxism
Review of Reinventing Marxism by Howard Sherman.
