Schumacher against globalism and ecomodernism: Ecology,subsidiarity and the politics of scale

Abstract

E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful is one of the most succinct elaborations of Catholic social teaching (CST) and ‘distributism’ – construed as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. Extending the logic of Polanyi, both market and state, and their right- and left-wing ideological expressions, are shown to be contending forms of collectivism – in that both aggregate the agency of disembedded ‘billiard ball’ individuals. Schumacher’s socio-economic vision is rooted in Livelihood and is orthogonal to both left and right, creating an opportunity for an alternative to modernity involving patterns of embedded production, consumption and reproduction (family, household and place-bound community). ‘Smallness’ and ‘localness’ speak to forms of embedded social capital that are ‘sticky’, viscous and relational, more ascriptive and less fluid. But for precisely this reason, the political agenda implicit in Schumacher’s vision is not only post-liberal, but explicitly both covenantal and Christian. It requires the ontology of sovereign, self-actualizing individuals to be reconnected and constrained through a transcendent relationality with God. Small is Beautiful is shown to be diametrically opposed to the eco-modernist, gnostic and sometimes even transhumanist worldview of global environmentalism.

Keywords

Catholic social teaching distributism Karl Polanyi post-liberalism subsidiarity E. F. Schumacher

Introduction

Schumacher’s fundamental commitment to a Catholic social teaching (CST) has been wilfully neglected by contemporary authors and organizations bearing his name. In this article, I show how Schumacher’s work presents a covenantal and historical vision, clearly rooted in Judeo-Christianity, demonstrating that Small is Beautiful was in fact one of the most succinct elaborations of a tradition of CST that had its roots in the mid-nineteenth-century Thomist vision of social justice. The lesson that Schumacher derived from Buddhism – namely, that work completes the whole person and embeds the dignity that comes from supporting others – is essentially the same as that offered by William Morris and guild socialists such as Cole (1920), but also Pope John Paul II (1991). Through an implicitly Thomist CST, Schumacher sought to reground economics in Aristotelian oikonomikē, which as I will argue below, following Polanyi, requires the re-embedding of economics into society.

While Schumacher’s name retains the aura of revelation in the green movement, organizations dedicated to his memory and works have worked hard to expunge any reference to Catholicism, whilst reducing the metaphysical dimension of the ecological problem to a generic, pan-human spirituality, that is, a version of the neo-Platonic ‘perennial philosophy’ (Huxley, 2004) stripped of the kind of natural law associated with, for instance, the traditionalist school (Guénon, 2001).¹ Thus, for instance, in carrying forward his legacy, the Schumacher Society’s ‘barefoot wayfaring’ methodology makes much of ‘complexity’ and ‘flexible narratives’, citing Goethe, Tim Ingold and even, somewhat bizarrely, Norbert Elias (Richardson & Shaw, 2001). But there is not a single reference anywhere on the website to Christianity, let alone Catholicism. Likewise, the Schumacher Institute (2023) frames its intellectual project in terms of complexity, resilience and the sustainable development goals but eschews any mention of family, natural law, Christianity or Catholicism. Instead, what is promoted is a deracinated, Indigenized spirituality in which Christianity is construed as part of the problem (Kimbrell, 2003; Spretnak 1984).

It is hard not to interpret this collective amnesia as arising in part from Schumacher’s own perception that the intellectual and political milieu of the 1970s would find Buddhism a rather easier pill to swallow than Christianity (Schumacher 1974). The site’s biography of Schumacher written by his daughter Barbara Wood devotes a chapter to ‘his Buddhism’ (although, clearly, he was not a Buddhist – see Leonard, 2019) but nothing to his Catholicism (despite her own degree in theology). And yet the much later sequel to her father’s book, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, was co-written with activist Catholic evangelist Joseph Pearce with a Forward by Barbara Wood and is framed very much by CST and the Church’s conception of natural law (Pearce, 2006).

In this new-age, eco-spiritual framing of ‘new economics’ (Centre for New Economics, 2023), the explicitly Christian, theological and metaphysical foundation for a small, beautiful and covenantal society has been eclipsed by ‘economics’, just as surely as, in Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the embedded forms of subsistence and reciprocation, and the commons, were eclipsed by the ‘cold calculus’ of market rationality. The proposed curriculum centres on an instrumental–rational assumption that education about ‘whole systems ecology’, ‘engaging stories’ and training workshops can together provide materials for ‘a new generation of local economists’. The implicit assumption seems to be that consumerism, ecological overshoot and spiritual unhappiness might be tweaked out of existence and that behaviour is a function of education and knowledge – which it most certainly is not (Dickinson, 2009). And yet Schumacher’s own personal library, donated to the Center for New Economics, contains approximately 200 items relating to Catholicism, approximately 500 relating to Christianity, approximately 140 on theology, approximately 50 relating to Belloc, Chesterton and distributism – with books on Aquinas, Augustine and critically, all of the relevant encyclicals from Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII (1878–1958). This collection speaks to a serious intellectual preoccupation with a rich and deeply intellectual theological tradition that goes back more than 2500 years; a pre-occupation which needs to be grappled with to understand Schumacher’s social critique.

On both sides of the Atlantic, in this sanitized Schumacher tradition, there are light-touch references to ‘the commons’ invoking Karl Polanyi. But these are stripped of any real sociological understanding of the primary mechanism of modernization as centering on disembedding (Polanyi, 1944, 1957a, 1968, 1971), disenchantment (Weber, 1978) social and spatial mobility (Bauman, 2000), the emergence of what Elias called the ‘society of individuals’ (Elias, 2010) or the consequences of this transformation in terms of chronic ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991), narcissism (Lasch, 1979), the erosion of communitarian solidarity (Lasch, 1986; Taylor, 1992), the destruction of moral consensus (MacIntyre, 2007, 2016), the emergence of an increasingly unstable modern self (Rieff, 1973; Trueman, 2020), the destruction of insulating, protective and (critically)shared hero/immortality projects’(Becker, 2014) or finally (and perhaps most comprehensively) the catastrophic severing of the social order from any sacred order (Rieff, 2006).

Instead, and in common with nearly all ostensibly radical economic–ecological critiques (most recently with Extinction Rebellion and ‘degrowth’), the neo-Schumacherians retain without comment or reflection the assumption that the post-modern, post-growth society will retain all the modern achievements in relation to liberal individual rights whilst resurrecting the perennial possibilities of anthropologically unspecified ‘community’ (e.g. Crabtree, 2020; see Quilley, 2011, 2013, 2019a, 2019b).² And yet Schumacher himself was perfectly clear that a Catholic and an ecological response to modernity involved a very specific negotiation. The community of individuals associated with the Church was rooted in the historical unfolding and recognition of the ‘Imago Dei’ – the sacral conception of individual people created in the image of God. For an orthodox Christian, the salvific purpose of the historical emergence of self is not a free-for-all of self-actualization based on a false anthropology of sovereignty and autonomy, but the freedom to choose a life ‘in relation’ – with God, via and through relation with other people (Vernon, 2019). This is why, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the sacrament of marriage so often provides the metaphor for metaphysical and ecological integrity more generally. As Rieff points out, any sacred order is by nature interdictory (2006) – which is to say it must be rooted in behavioural injunctions ‘to do’ and ‘not to do’. A relation of covenant, with God, with a spouse, with children, with a place-bound community, a nation or an ecosystem or a landscape must first and foremost involve joy and liberation through self-restraint. As Macintyre realized, the grounding liberal anthropology which starts from a primal authentic autonomy and sovereignty is simply wrong. Our natural condition – at birth, as parents, in pregnancy, in old age – is of ‘dependent rational animals’ (Macintyre, 2001 – my emphasis).

But since the 1980s, green intellectuals and activists, and it seems nearly all self-professed Schumacherians, have embraced an implicitly liberal, Enlightenment metaphysics that rejects the implications of the covenantal theology and of natural law. In the early 1970s, the ‘Limits to Growth’ report (Meadows, 1974) had appeared to construct any truly green society as antithetical to liberal modernity. In the West, the mainstream left rejected limits because growth was the foundation of the Keynesian social compact that had kept the class peace and secured cohesion and social progress since the war. Market liberals argued against the idea of limits in principle (Simon, 1981). For the newly independent developing nations of the ‘Third World’, any proposal to limit growth was an unjust anathema that barred the way to modernity. From the 1980s, green politics was defined by the tension between pragmatic modernists on the one hand and limits-sensitive critics of modernity (Quilley, 2017).

Back in the 1970s, Green Parties campaigned against immigration (on the grounds of carrying capacity), against nuclear power, against European integration and against any expansion of global trade, and in favour of national and regional sufficiency. Deep ecology and even strains of primitivism dominated the intellectual zeitgeist of radical environmentalism (Drengson et al., 2011; Zerzan, 2002). But over time, the response of the mainstream green movement to the politics of growth was to downplay biophysical limits in favour of ‘sustainable development’ and the technical agenda of ecological modernization (Hajer, 2000; Mol & Sonnenfeld, 2000). By the late 1980s, this agenda had become hegemonic in all areas of government and academia, in corporate life and across an increasingly professionalized green movement. Foregrounding the social dimension of the ‘triple bottom line’, Green Parties and other organizations have become as concerned with the politics of liberation as with strictly ecological integrity (Kish and Quilley 2021). Whereas ‘ecological economics’ had insisted on a hierarchy in which the primacy of ecological/metabolic scale set limits on questions of justice, which in turn constrained the free play of market efficiency (Daly, 2007), in academia and activism, social justice is now routinely privileged above even ecological concerns (although mostly implicitly and with a large measure of cognitive dissonance).

Although enormously attractive and in many ways emancipatory, the social complexity of the liberal cosmopolitan vision of the welfare state comes with a high metabolic price tag (Kish and Quilley 2017). Because it depends on an expanding market economy and a generous protective carapace of state provision, this vision of individual self-determination is simply incompatible with any contraction in the scale or scope of the formal economy (Quilley, 2013, 2019a, 2019b). Even the degrowth movement, which is explicitly committed to the contraction of the economy (Daly’s primacy of scale), construes the achievements of liberal individualism – mobility, sexual and gender self-determination, multi-cultural diversity and a more general humanist cosmopolitanism – as non-negotiable. And because of this, as ‘recovering environmentalist’ Paul Kingsnorth discovered, the green movement has become thoroughly modernist (Kingsnorth, 2022). It is in this context that the covenantal Christian framing of Schumacher’s vision of decentralization becomes ever more relevant and contested in equal measure. Predicated on the tissue of social relationships but also on a condition of absolute dependency on God, in Schumacher’s understanding, the ‘Imago Dei’ (the Judeo-Christian conception of humans created in God’s image – see below) sustains the liberal conception of the sanctity of the individual. But by reframing the metaphysical context for the profound sense of self that has emerged in modern societies in terms of a (future/transcendent) good life, Christianity potentially weakens the grip of material wealth and conspicuous consumption, and so economic growth, in individual and societal understandings of well-being. Re-embedded in both communitarian ties of mutual obligation but also religious imperatives for charity and self-restraint, for Schumacher this conception of personhood allows for a sacral vision of individual human dignity but at a much lower metabolic price tag. More precisely, it makes possible, he intuits: (i) the primacy of metabolic scale and the reality of limits without sacrificing the individual; and (ii) sovereignty and free-will, without sacrificing the individual to a culture of meaningless narcissism and existential despair.

Catholic social teaching

Schumacher’s vision of small-scale, decentralized political economy is framed explicitly in terms of the social catholic notion of subsidiarity. In the final section of Small is Beautiful, he details the standard Catholic understanding of this concept (Schumacher, 2011 [1973], Loc 3142). Codified by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891) and popularized by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc after WWI under the banner of distributism (Belloc, 1936, 1977; Chesterton, 1927; Gill, 2007; Hickey, 2018), CST was an attempt to articulate an alternative trajectory for modernity (for full review, see Zieba, 2014). Understood as a ‘third way’, CST has been construed as an attempt to society between the ideological excesses of capitalism and (Marxist) socialism; the Market and the State, or what Pope Pius XI referred to as ‘twin-rocks of shipwreck’ (1931).

The political economy that emerged in the wake of Rerum Novarum (Pope Leo XIII, 1891) centred on a vision of a maximal distribution of private property such that households, organized around the ‘natural family’ (Carlson, 2015; Zimmerman, 2008), would retain a low-overhead means of subsistence independent of both the capitalist labour market and the state. Emerging from a Catholic church in Europe belatedly getting to grips with modernity and the dynamics of industrialization, urbanization and individualization, Rerum Novarum was an attempt to reassert both the dignity or work and self-sufficiency associated with the yeoman peasantry.

That this continental spirit of nostalgia was taken up with such alacrity in England by Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton is not simply a function of its Catholicism. It also resonated with the late Victorian enthusiasm for medieval forms of community that were seen to compare favourably with the grotesque polarization, deprivation, disenchantment (Matthew Arnold) alienation (Marx) and anomie (Durkheim) engendered by industrialism. This spirit of retrospection was clear in the work of William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, in the cultural criticism of Ruskin and in the rediscovery of guild forms of association by English streams of socialist thought that were more communitarian than collectivist (Boos, 1992; Cole, 1920; Hutchinson, 1997).

So, what is subsidiarity and why was it important to the ecological economic vision of Schumacher? I will address the first of these questions here, before exploring Schumacher’s understanding and use of the concept in later sections of Small is Beautiful. The concept of subsidiarity goes back to Aristotle and the natural law theology of Thomas Aquinas (Aroney, 2014) and centres on the general principle that higher order levels of organization and society must support lower order ones without such intermediate forms being absorbed or substituted (Evans & Zimmermann, 2014, p. 2). In the modern period, the central figure is Luigi Taparelli. Having rediscovered an authentic and creative Thomist theology (in contrast to the dry scholasticism that dominated the counter Enlightenment) Taparelli reaffirmed the distinction between individual rights (in say the Lockean tradition of entitlement theory) and ‘group rights’. His critical insight ‘was that all societies other than the most basic ones such as families…are always composed of other societies, and there exist social riles governing relations among such nested and overlapping societies’ (Brennan, 2014, p. 34).

The concept of subsidiarity arises from a philosophical–anthropological predicate that the human person is born and remains, as Macintyre put it, a dependent rational animal (Macintyre, 2001) and that family, as a precondition for human reproduction and nurture, precedes and is anterior to the state (Pope Leo XIII, 1891, p. 14). Family is always the primary consideration. The context for this reaffirmation of what had once been obvious was the long history of socialist theorizing starting with Engels and carried forward by socialist feminists such as Alexandra Kollontaĭ. A prominent Soviet revolutionary, Kollontaĭ sought the complete destruction of the natural family and a socialization by the state of all the functions of schooling, child-rearing, parenting and even (eventually) conception and pregnancy (Kollontaĭ, 1971; see Stites, 1999). From the same root, these ideas engendered similar projects under fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. In 1920s Russia, Kollontaĭ was intent on the complete abolition of the bourgeois parenting function in favour of compulsory state-run ‘total’ child rearing institutions: ‘The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children’ (Kollontaĭ, 1920, para 17; see also Kollontaĭ, 2024). This could just as easily have been a summary of the ethos of the Hitler Youth. A cognate ideological battle is currently being re-fought in North American schools in relation to the issue of ‘parents’ rights’ and the extent to which teachers should or should not be able to impose radical gender ideology without parents’ knowledge or consent. Clearly not as encompassing or extreme, this tension between the relative authority of parents and the state has been an ongoing feature of struggle between modernist and reactionary responses to modernity. Catholic opposition to the latitude demanded by some teachers’ bodies is framed precisely in terms of subsidiarity and a conception of natural law that sees family and marriage as preceding and necessarily autonomous from higher level state ‘societies’ (Heipel, 2022).

Although implicit in Rerum Novarum, the concept of subsidiarity was only spelled out definitively by Pope Pius XI, just as the capitalist world economy was spinning into global crisis, the Weimar Republic was lurching towards fascism and the Soviet Union was launching its disastrous, although initially successful, experiment in totalitarian centrally planned economics. Writing in 1931, Pope Pius observed: ‘[It is a] grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and greater organisation to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies’ (Pope Pius XI, 1931, p. 25). This captures the essence of the concept as it was elaborated 80 years later by Pope Benedict:

Subsidiarity is first and foremost a form of assistance to the human person via the autonomy of intermediate bodies…Subsidiarity respects personal dignity by recognizing in the person a subject who is always capable of giving something to others. By considering reciprocity as the heart of what it is to be human, subsidiarity is the most effective antidote against any form of all-encompassing welfare state. It is able to take account of the manifold articulation of plans – and therefore of the plurality of subjects – as well as the coordination of those plans. [The principle is well suited to] managing globalization and directing it towards authentic human development. (Pope Benedict XVI, 2009, p. 57)

Essentially, subsidiarity is understood in terms of a ‘division of competences’ that becomes more complex as a function of what Émile Durkheim referred to as the social division of labour (Durkheim, 1960). Sociologically and politically, subsidiarity was a response to the inevitably more complex structure of industrial mass societies and the growth of the state. Emphasizing the autonomy of lower rungs, distributism resonated with Durkheim’s warning about the dangers of psychological anomie as mobile individuals became increasingly disengaged from the ascriptive ‘gemeinschaftlich’ structures of cellular and more place-bound forms of traditional society. Intermediate forms of association were critical in shielding such individuals from the faceless dynamics of both bureaucratic state and corporate market. But at the same time, in CST, this ‘vertical autonomy’ always sat alongside the balancing imperative of solidarity between groups – a principle that might play out in redistributive transfers, practical aid, physical care of financial charity (Pope John Paul II, 1991, p. 15). As Brennan summarizes, CST construes social justice as the demand for the common good to be realized through societies, institutions and groups and entails (i) the negative principle of non-absorption of lower by higher societies; and (ii) that aid and solidarity to a particular society or form of association at any level should be given for the purpose of encouraging and strengthening that society or modality and not simply fulfilling the function by another means (Brennan, 2014).

In Section 4 of Small is Beautiful on ‘Organization and Ownership’ (Schumacher, 2011, Loc 2142) drawing on this standard Catholic historiography, two of Schumacher’s five political economic principles hinge on subsidiarity:

Subsidiarity: that the burden of proof must always be on those who would deprive a lower level of its function and freedom; and that the centre will gain in authority and effectiveness to the degree that the freedom and responsibility of lower formations is preserved.

Vindication: that the centre must vindicate any arrogation of authority from lower levels. He writes ‘Good government is always government by exception’.

His fifth principle, the ‘Middle Axiom’, relates to the irresolvable tension between order and creativity. Local, familial and community self-determination are non-negotiable if the stifling impact of planning and bureaucratic accountability are to be kept in check:

Without magnanimity of disorder, the happy abandon, the entrepreneurship venturing into the unknown and the incalculable, without the risk and the gamble, the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread – without this life is a mockery and a disgrace. (2011 [1973], Loc 3247)

Finally, although in the book Schumacher doesn’t explicitly foreground the family, the fact that he himself had eight children at a time when other environmentalists were warning of the ‘population bomb’ (Ehrlich, 1971) combined with his explicit endorsement of Humanae Vitae (1968) ³ and the very clear insistence on the priority of lower levels of human sociality and coordination make it difficult to separate traditional family from his ecological politics of scale. In his delineation of good versus bad forms of private property he argues in favour of property that is an ‘aid to creative work’…which he understood as automatically ‘small scale, personal and local’ (2011 [1973], Loc 3414). Self-evidently in the history of civilization, the (sometimes extended) nuclear family has been the primary vehicle for small scale, personal and local forms of economic life (Zimmerman, 2008).

More generally, the constant emphasis on spiritual formation and metaphysical iconography as opposed to the ‘idol worship of material possessions’ (2011 [1973], Loc 3400) underlines the importance of belief in the living God which can only be transmitted through the ‘pattern language’ of family, neighbourhood and church, to use the language of Christopher Alexander, another committed but sotto voce Catholic of note (Alexander, 2002).

In fact, the concept of subsidiarity – addressing problems at the lowest and most local scale possible consistent with their resolution – opens a third dimension in the political/ideological state space, entirely orthogonal to both state and market. It is on this basis that modern proponents for subsidiarity hold the key to reforming the pathologies of the modern national welfare state (Sirico, 2014). At the same time, as a vehicle for leavening and restraining both market and intrusive modern welfare state, subsidiarity and the political economy of distributism depend to a great deal on the presence of a shared ontology, ritual life and place-bound ‘communitas’ (Turner, 1969). The difficulties that are associated with the realization of this potential tend to increase with the size, secularity and diversity of any society. In the post-Christian, hyper-mobile context of the European Union (EU), it is not surprising that subsidiarity is generally seen to fail (Katcherian, 2012); nor that every time communitarian localism makes a foray into the world of practical politics, as with the Cameron government’s experiment in ‘Big Society’, it is seen as divisive, ‘right wing’ and antithetical to (state orchestrated) social justice (Catney et al., 2014).

Karl Polanyi: Market–state versus livelihood

In his post-war essays, Polanyi (1957b, 1968) developed the economic anthropology implicit in The Great Transformation (1944) in ways that are critical to understanding Schumacher’s decentrist vision. Elsewhere I have spelled out in detail a political economic theory, drawn from Polanyi, that is only sketched here (Quilley, 2012; Quilley & Zywert, 2019). In essence, it amounts to the following propositions:

In pre-modern societies, there was no ‘economy’ as such.

When people start using that term to describe a domain of subsistence activity (e.g. processing energy and materials; deploying technologies; trade and exchange) that is dominated by instrumental-rational ontological frameworks, which are in turn analytically, functionally and perceptually separate from other domains (family, culture, religion) – this is a good sign that one is dealing with a modern society.

In most antecedent human societies, what we call ‘economic’ activities are so woven into the cloth of domains of life as to be indistinguishable (Malinowski, 2002). In these cases, the rationality regulating and driving behaviour is substantive and tied up with much wider matrix of culturally defined ‘ends.’

For Polanyi, the central mechanism driving the process of modernization involved the ‘disembedding’ of both individuals and economic activities out of the tightly woven mesh of ascriptive roles and relationships, patterns of interdependency and place-bound familial and neighbourhood ‘survival units’ (to use Elias’s term 2010). Pre-modern peasants were enmeshed into rhythmic and recurring patterns of activities that played out in the context of particular places and landscapes (or ‘taskscapes’, Ingold, 2000), and over generations. This created the bedrock of what Tönnies called ‘Gemeinschaft’ (1963), and it is the constancy of this activity that suggested the imagery of Edmund Burke’s description of society as a generational (rather than individual) contract: ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (1790, Loc 360).

From this point of view, the political economy of modernity is best described as a disembedding movement from the rich, relational, contextual, place-bound and nested matrix of Livelihood that defined traditional societies, into State–Market societies. The left/right potentials and polarities of modern societies are best seen as variations on this theme. With this in mind, we might reconsider the conventional rendering of left-wing collectivist political solutions as the intervening left hand of the state (Bourdieu et al., 2011) resisting the encroachments of the market. This is certainly how Polanyi understood his own cautiously socialist politics. But the trouble with this picture is that the domain of Livelihood simply disappears from view; at most an interesting historical anachronism, because ‘we are all modern now’. Modernity has certainly pulled into its orbit the great swathe of human society. But this renders invisible and to an extent incomprehensible societal and political economic ‘adjacent possibilities’ that are genuinely orthogonal to both Market and State. In both cases, billiard-ball individualism obscures more communitarian possibilities.

Bad anthropology but also the direction of travel

The ideologies of both (market/social) liberalism and (state) socialism thus both start from an erroneous anthropology that starts with atomized, sovereign individuals. The left is collectivist, but it is the agency of billiard ball individuals that is ‘collected’ via parties, unions and control of the State; whilst the Market, likewise, is a mechanism for collecting and allocating the agency of individual rational choice-makers (and is in this sense also ‘collectivist’).

Long and convoluted, the genealogy of this idea starts with Descartes and the contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau before working its way into the familiar matrix of the nineteenth-century political ideologies (nationalism, liberalism, socialism and conservatism), and eventually via Marxism into the twentieth-century feminism and most recently the radical gender theory and the cognate ideologies of transgenderism and transhumanism (Trueman, 2020). The anthropological image of humanity shared by the poles of left and right is certainly ideological and misleading; but it is a picture that edges closer to reality with ongoing processes of modernization. Polanyi was right that that late eighteenth-century vision of a market society was a utopian project that proved ultimately to be a political impossibility. But the response to the ‘disembedding’ of economy from society was not any systemic ‘re-embedding’. Rather, from the 1850s, the countervailing protective mechanism triggered as a response to ‘market collectivism’ turned out to be simply another kind of collectivism (Quilley, 2012).

The Imago Dei and the individual unbound

Although fossil-fuelled social complexity and capitalist modernization drove the process (Bauman, 2000; Elias, 2010), the taken for granted Western individualism that is now (but only now) culminating in ‘obvious’ intuitions about human rights was only possible in the wake of the Judeo-Christian understanding of the Imago Dei (Genesis 1: 27): that is, that humans are intrinsically individual; sacral in the image of God and valuable in themselves; born with a complementary male or female sexual identity. Revolutionary and profoundly disruptive, this idea percolated through Hebrew, late Roman and medieval European societies for millennia, sowing the seeds for the modern revolution (Holland, 2019, 2022; Siedentop, 2014; Wahrman, 2004). Using philology to peel back the history of human consciousness, Barfield made a compelling argument that liberal individualism derived ultimately from monotheism. The emergence of the distinctive, bounded subjective self that modern people take for granted emerged, he argued, in wake of a monotheistic and transcendent understanding of divinity, that is, in Yahweh (God) as the ground of all being, the ‘I am who I am’ who revealed himself to Moses (Exodus 3: 14). For Barfield, the progressive withdrawal of divinity and of a participating consciousness into a singular transcendent God that allows a parallel condensation of subjectivity into the bounded ego that eventually becomes the modern subject (Barfield, 1988; Vernon, 2019). This potential for individuation was eventually and slowly translated into the body politic by Christianity (Holland, 2019). In all sorts of ways, Christendom embodied the image of the sacramental individual into legal and cultural norms – with the progressive elimination of slavery (albeit with a catastrophic but temporary reversal with the colonization of the New World),⁴ with the criminalization of infanticide, the entrenchment of legal protections associated with due process, the emergence of notions of entitlement (to alms, etc.) and ‘rights’ as a corollary of biblical interdicts vis-à-vis charity (Holland, 2022).

Even in the modern society of individuals, the self is continually (re)constructed relationally, produced through a dynamic matrix of interdependent relations (Elias, 2010; Goffman, 1959; Mead, 1934). But at the same time, as with the utopian project of the market described by Polanyi, it is also true that modern society has moved progressively in the direction of atomization. Each extension of both the Market and the State has led to further atomization, the further closure of the self, and the erosion and elimination of those nested intermediate forms of association between the individual and society lamented by Émile Durkheim.

From early modernity and again in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in the face of this concerted market-led atomization, there were many grassroots initiatives to rebuild such associational forms. Practical experiments ranged from Catalan ‘Txoko’ cooking clubs – lifelong, covenantal, sacramental, quasi familial and involving rites of passage (Hess, 2007) – to friendly societies and a resurgence of interest in medieval guilds. But if there was a contest between bottom-up, place-bound communitarian and state-led collectivist responses, two world wars tipped the hand decisively in favour of the latter (Quilley, 2012).

Essentially, commentators such as Macintyre (2007), Rieff (2006) and Hahn & McGinley (2020) understand this sociological transformation as a kind of Polanyian double movement. Capitalist modernization allowed the full unfolding of the Judeo-Christian process of individuation, whilst at the same time severing the individual from the interdictory sacred order. In the process what emerges is a culture of idolatry and narcissism in which the highest value is self-actualization. In late-modern consumer societies, the self has become an autochthonous self-creation. For both Catholic reactionaries such as Schumacher or guild socialists like Morris, the potential for a covenantal society – whether this involves rich individuation in relation with God or more prosaically with a place-bound community – has morphed into a transactional society of billiard ball individuals.

Christians describe the disordered subordination to wealth, sexual gratification, fame and celebrity in terms of a systemic idolatry; and this idolatry is manifest in seemingly endless wells of depression, anxiety, gender dysphoria, anorexia, falling birthrates, loss of civic engagement, unrestrained consumerism and ultimately the ecological crises of sustainability – all of which can be traced back to a disordered and untethered understanding of self. These are consequences of individuals being deprived of the constraining but nurturing framework of interdiction and taboo concomitant on a sacred order. This is the underlying intuition that Schumacher – along with Tolstoy, Illich, Berry and Gandhi and more recently Herman Daly – applied to the environmental crisis: that is, that ecological restraint at the societal level depended upon covenantal relationships, sustained by love and reciprocation, the re-embedding of ‘economic’ activity and on ensuring that individuals remain ‘ends’ and are not turned into a ‘means’ for what Paul Kingsnorth calls ‘the machine’ (2021). Given that until the last decade of the twentieth-century radical green politics and Christian asceticism shared an underlying metaphysics, is perhaps not surprising that Greens of all stripes have found it as hard as Christians to resist the allure of Babylon. And this is because the modern world has engendered very real forms of material and social liberation – the welfare safety net, sexual liberation, women’s emancipation, cosmopolitan diversity – that emerge very directly from the (contested) balance of Market and State and are often intrinsically at odds with the Gemeinschaft promised by Livelihood (Quilley, 2011, 2013).

The tilt towards state-led collectivism/atomic individualism set the ground rules for everything that has come since, not least the tramlines of mainstream twenty-first-century green politics. The consensual welfare state has made social cohesion and political legitimation entirely dependent on growth. There is no ‘trivial consumption’ that can be surgically removed without consequence (Quilley, 2017). A politics of degrowth and ecological restraint is simply not possible without precisely that same binding, interdictory, sacred order that eco-modernist progressivism has abandoned. This, in turn, seems unimaginable not because religion has disappeared per se, but because it has become privatized as an individual preference separate from the transactional world of everyday life and impotent in terms of societal value-formation (Becker, 2014; Rieff, 1973; Taylor, 1992, 2018). Finally, in a secular world, disconnected from the sacred order, individual meaning and ontologies are now deeply connected to consumption. Consumerism is now the dominant ‘hero/immortality project’ for billions of billiard ball individuals whose connection to the transcendent order has been severed. Experimental evidence from terror management theory suggests that climate crisis and any environmental activism that draws attention to societal disorder are likely to drive even greater consumption and conflict (Arndt et al., 2004; Becker, 2014; Dickinson, 2009).

‘Small and Beautiful’ would necessarily be post-liberal

Since 2016, there has been a growing argument on parts of both the left and the right that any viable future can only be post-liberal. Unarticulated by the party-political system, post-liberalism generally conforms to the ‘right on culture/left on economy’ formula associated with the Blue Labour/Red Tory of figures such as Maurice Glasman and Phillip Blond (Blond, 2010; Glasman, 2022). Starting with John Gray and Alasdair Macintyre, the intellectual mantle is now carried by academics such as John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (Gray, 1993, 2007; Milbank & Pabst, 2016; Pabst, 2017). The more digestible statements of this emerging political frame have been provided by many of those associated with the National Conservatism movement that has migrated from the United States to the United Kingdom – including Vance (2017), Patrick Deneen (2018), Yorem Hazony (2022), Paul Embery (2021), Mary Harrington (2023) and David Goodheart (2017). It should be noted in passing that this is an extremely diverse movement, and Milbank would almost certainly disavow most of the Americans listed.

After Brexit and Trump, the common threads of this movement, such as it is, have coalesced around a rejection of globalization and a commitment to national sovereignty, but also the search for more embedded, localized forms of economy that enhance neighbourhood engagement, local sufficiency and a communitarian rather than individual framework for care. It should be very clear that this agenda is much closer to the political economy envisaged by Schumacher than any of the invocations of global governance and ecomodernism that have become the default agenda of the contemporary green movement⁵ (Quilley, 2017). Although few of these authors come anywhere near close to acknowledging the scale of the ecological crisis, they do create space for a genuinely covenantal and communitarian approach to social life rooted in natural law and religion that could, at least in theory, provide the basis for a systemic shift away from consumerism and in favour of an immanent structure of social and psychological restraint – in our relations with each other and with the rest of creation.

True to the personalist Catholic anthropology later expressed by Pope John Paul II (1991), the consistent subtext of Small is Beautiful is that the inviolable dignity of the human person created in the image of God is realized through covenant with our immediate families, with nested communities and with God. It is to this end that he quotes Dorothy Sayer’s affirmation of natural law (2011 [1973], Loc 351) as a disavowal of the vision of autonomous and self-directed individuals. Such a liberal vision of sovereignty always defaults to ‘array of unwarrantable wants…[and] the sin of greed that has delivered us over to the power of the machine’ (my emphasis – he borrows a term from Mumford, picked up more recently by Paul Kingsnorth to the same end 2021). This personalist covenantal anthropology is completely incompatible with the Cartesian ‘billiard ball’ metaphysical anthropology that underpins all modern political ideologies and programmes, be they social democratic, Marxist, liberal, feminist, nationalist or right-wing libertarian.

Denying our biology as ‘dependent rational animals’ (Macintyre, 2001), the unit of analysis is a Cartesian ghost, hermetically sealed into a sexless and genderless body, autonomous, mobile and sovereign. In privileging bodily and psychological autonomy, such modern ideologies have consistently sought for either or both the state and the market to replace a covenantal, familial and community-based division of labour. But whilst both state and market can babysit, monitor an elderly relative and fulfil some rudimentary parental functions, neither are able to love. In either case, contractual dependence, time-limited transactions and future discounted economic calculations progressively displace love and covenant which are unlimited and unconditional. This goes to the heart of Schumacher’s vision. Small is Beautiful was fundamentally a critique of modernity and the hubristic Gnosticism that would envisage the remaking of the material world and of human nature in the image of a Promethean, human creative project.

Schumacher’s subsidiarist vision of political economy should be understood as a challenge to global, price-setting markets and place-less corporations, but also to modern states and supranational patterns of governance associated with, for instance, the United Nations and the EU. Most of all, informed by the decentralist vision of his mentor Leopold Kohr (Kohr, 1986, 1992), his framing of Livelihood (my term lifted from Polanyi) challenges the hyper-social/spatial mobility of individuals that paradoxically underpins both the collectivism associated with the State, and the valorization of mobility and choice associated with the Market. In other words, Livelihood centres on a pattern of ‘smallness’ and ‘localness’ that hinges on forms of embedded social capital that are ‘sticky’, more viscous and relational, and a form of social life that is more ascriptive and less fluid. It presents a challenge to the collectivism and the associated billiard ball anthropology of both the Market and the State (Quilley & Zywert, 2019).⁶

However, Schumacher was not making simply technical claims about devolution, federalism or efficiency. As evidenced above, any political project of decentralism that was not rooted in a metaphysical commitment to the transcendent could not, for Schumacher, contain the crisis of meaning that drives the ‘array of unwarrantable wants’. He would have given no credence to the EU’s pretensions to subsidiarity. The project of protecting the autonomy and agency of nested levels of association only makes sense with what Hahn and McGinely (riffing on Geertz, 2017) refer to as a conception of ‘thick community’ in which different levels and entities are associated with non-negotiable rights and duties (Hahn & McGinley, 2020, Loc 579). For Schumacher, by forcibly freeing up billiard ball individuals from the tissue of social covenant, interdependence and rich relationality, modernization has distorted what he understood as the beautiful truth of the Imago Dei, rendering the modern-self pathological, locked into shallow transactional relationships, at war with other selves, and with nature.

The social catholic doctrine of subsidiarity is not, Hahn and McGinley argue, ‘so much about devolution or federalism of efficiency, as it is about order – ensuring that each level of social organization takes responsibility for the goods proper to it’ (Loc 591). ‘Thick communities’ come with a package of rights and obligations (Loc 579) which in turn necessitate a constant negotiation of relationships and commitments between individuals, to family and clan, to neighbours in place-bound community and to the more abstract patterns of mutual identification and ‘imagined community’ associated with nation and global community. Only the social Catholic doctrine of distributism, they argue, provides an appropriately meaningful framework for a political economy in which the domains of individual autonomy, livelihood, market and state find some kind of balance. From the perspective of Catholic apologetics, this is possible because an understanding of freedom that is rooted in natural law and virtue ethics. In this view, rather than in liberation of the self from external (social, political or economic) constraint, freedom is realized most fully by graceful submission to the transcendent order of the universe (God’s will, or the Natural Law). The reason that marriage provides the most persistent metaphor for this encompassing vision of covenant is that it is through obligations to spouse and dependent children that men and women can most easily free themselves of the tyranny of self-regard.

It is not difficult to make the case that this understanding of freedom is hardly adequate to address very real problems of political oppression or extreme poverty. But it is easier to reconcile with an environmental metaphysic of ascetism. And there is much evidence that secularism, the sexual revolution and the project of unlimited individual freedom are proving corrosive and possibly terminal to liberal society in terms of happiness, mental health, the high energy metabolism of individualist societies, consumerism and most recently demographic collapse (Harrington, 2023; Morse, 2022; Perry, 2022; Regnerus, 2020; Tucker, 2014; Zimmerman, 2008).

This covenantal theology contrasts with the shrill insistence on sovereignty, autonomy and self-actualization that emerge from Cartesian and Enlightenment understandings of personhood. This materialist individualism animates even seemingly opposed modern secular ideologies such as market (neo) liberalism, libertarianism, feminism, all strands of socialism and most recently progressive liberalism and those transhumanist visions of artificial pregnancy and embryo creation (Al-Ghaili, 2023), neural implants and artificial intelligence. There is some truth in Charles Taylor’s argument that the valorization of ordinary individual lives that has become a central motif in modernity involved a radical extension of Christian individualism that was only possible with the dethroning of Christendom (Taylor, 1999). However, that Schumacher seems to have shared the consistent pontifical assessment of liberal individualism as corrosive and destabilizing does not mean that he was ‘illiberal’. Rather he recognized, like Novak, that ‘the cardinal tenet of liberalism is not so much denied as subsumed within a social and transcendent framework’ (Novak, 2017, p. 130). Having said this, as with contemporary post-liberals, it is very hard to avoid the reality that any qualification of the tenets of individual sovereignty that have undergirded all forms of Enlightenment progressivism must entail some diminishment in freedom and that is likely to fall unevenly on different groups.

Stating the problem in this way underlines the extent to which any religious balancing of present goods with the future ‘good life to come’ has often provided a more compelling vehicle for ecological restraint. In contrast, denying any kind of transcendent meaning, modernism is essentially a form of Gnosticism in that it relies on a special/technical knowledge whereby individuals can transform themselves and society completely and perfectly and in doing so effecting Voegelin’s ‘immanentization of the eschaton’ – that is, to build a ‘New Jerusalem’ in this life, and here on Earth (1987). Capitalist modernization has undoubtedly alleviated material suffering in a way unprecedented in human history (Pinker, 2019). But it is proving very hard to know when to stop, when ‘enough is enough’ or how to effect any metabolic slowdown.

The paradox is that the secular technical culture of billiard ball individualism (i.e. modernism and therefore liberalism) – was brought into existence in the wake of the Judeo-Christian Imago Dei. Although constantly dynamic, the ‘complete act’ that sustained the development of Christendom, provided an ontological frame of reference, a high degree of moral consensus, taken for granted, socially embedded virtues and a high degree of moral-legal continuity and stability (Quilley, 2022; Willard, 2017). For sure, there was nothing green or conservationist about this habitus. But precisely because it always refracted images of individual and group success through a covenantal conception linking past, present and future generations with a transcendent God, it did normalize individual and collective restraint. This is why Old Order Mennonites who care little per se for environmentalism (Loewen, 2021) have much lower carbon footprints than any green/XR activist with a cell phone and a Twitter account. The valorization of a future ‘good life’ that is immaterial also instils a scepticism about the priority of worldly goods. Rooted in the idea original sin, there is a consistent recognition that in human affairs – within individuals, families and corporations – there is an unavoidable (almost entropic) dissipative momentum towards corruption. Human nature is flawed, and motivations, behaviour and incentive structures are always likely to trip up any grand designs. In this context, personal consumption and material success can take second place to a more communitarian understanding of human ‘thriving’.

For the distributists, this emphasis on the formation of individuals embedded in a matrix of relationships was associated with a profoundly Thomist covenantal preoccupation with the formation of personality and the nurturing of virtue – in the dispositions and habitus of individuals but also in their relations of interdependency. The Imago Dei creates the possibility of free will but not for the purpose of creating a culture of social and economic libertines. Rather, Catholics are called to choose God, to enter freely chosen, but binding, loving relationships and to discover freedom through a life of constraint.

The economic implications of this vision are profoundly different to both the libertarian shibboleths of Homo economicus and the top-down, utilitarian and collectivist logic of ‘new socialist man’. Drawing on the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language games, post-liberal theology (Barron, 2016) starts from scepticism about the rationality of any individual thinking subject (Descartes’ ‘thinking statue’). Rather, rationality is a communal and generational achievement associated with the living tradition of communal life. Wittgenstein’s analytical philosophy may seem to cave into epistemological and moral relativism. But in fact, seen in terms of a historical process, it is actually compatible with a rather Burkean understanding of an iterative, contextual, constantly re-tested and revisable approximation of ‘truth’ (Loyal & Quilley, 2013).

The underlay of Christian faith leavening Western societies was not a body of rational doctrines or Romantic sensibilities but rather a reservoir of shared virtue replenished by a lived culture and language. The body of guiding doctrines associated with the Catechism of the Catholic Church function as ‘depth grammar’ ordering and structuring the more quotidian practices, skills, habits associated with the life of the church and its parishes. It evokes what amounts to a ‘theological commons’ – a continuous, regulated interpretation of scripture in the light of new contexts, tradition (of the Magisterium) and a language, culture and pattern of life that is intrinsic to a particular Christian community.

Conclusion

The subsidiarist political economy of Small is Beautiful presents a challenge to global, price-setting markets and place-less corporations but also to modern states and supranational patterns of governance associated with, for instance, the United Nations and the EU. Most of all, livelihood challenges the hyper social/spatial mobility of individuals that paradoxically underpins both the collectivism associated with the state (individual citizens), and the valorization of mobility and choice associated with the market (individual consumers). ‘Smallness’ and localism speak to forms of embedded social capital that are ‘sticky’, more viscous and relational, and a form of social life that is more ascriptive and less fluid. For the distributists, this emphasis on the formation of individuals embedded in a matrix of relationships was associated with a profoundly Thomist, covenantal preoccupation with the formation of personality and the nurturing of virtue – in the dispositions and habitus of individuals, but also in their relations of interdependency.

In the early 1970s, Schumacher’s vision linked ecological limits and the disorder in our species’ relationship with the biosphere, to the social and spiritual limits of modernity, that is, disordered patterns of social and family life and the kind of excessive, narcissistic individualism described during the same period by Rieff, Lasch and Senior (Lasch, 1979; Rieff, 1973; Senior, 1978). Fifty years on, the localist impulse of the green movement has been almost completely stifled in the public arena. Both green politicians and degrowth activists tend, in practice, to be driven by taken for granted commitments to a very liberal and cosmopolitan conception of individual sovereignty and freedom. This is evident in relation to diverse issues such as migration and open borders; abortion; EU-membership; gender self-identification and so on (e.g. Extinction Rebellion US, 2023; Green Party, 2019). Coherent within a liberal frame, together such commitments are impossible to disentangle from a high-energy, globally integrated growth economy. The crescendo of concern about climate change has led to a policy dialogue that revolves almost completely around global scale interventions in technology, regulation and governance (Schwab, 2020). At Davos and the regular stream of climate conventions, ecomodernism rubs along quite merrily with the 4th Industrial Revolution and harbingers of Artificail Intelligence and transhumanism (World Economic Forum, 2018). This agenda must be eco-modernist because it has no purchase on the formation of conscience and personality – on the human ‘second nature’. And yet given that it must focus on exactly the matrix of predispositions and motivations that constitute virtue, any systemic critique of growth and consumerism (as with ‘degrowth’) must be incompatible with secular, cosmopolitan liberal individualism. But for decades, mainstream commentaries on Schumacher’s legacy have deliberately expunged exactly this dimension of his work – not least his active endorsement of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) that affirmed traditional marriage as the foundation for economy and society.

Explicating this more rounded, Catholic Schumacher with the anthropology of Karl Polanyi, this article has drawn out a covenantal approach to both ecological conscience formation and economic localism that is implicit in Schumacher’s understanding of subsidiarity. Regardless of any particular technological solutions, for Schumacher, the default orientation should be towards smaller scale, more locally embedded, familial and low-overhead forms of production that are more embedded in the mesh of cultural, ritual and religious lives of particular communities. This resonates with the kind of Burkean localism advanced by Scruton (2013). It cannot be secular because it is only the framing ontology of a shared orientation to transcendent values that can restrain human behaviour and nurture the kind of ‘freedom through constraint’ that binds any covenantal relationship. In this, Schumacher’s intuitions are in line with recent findings in social psychology. Conscience formation cannot be an instrumental–rational process of teaching – however, much education remains the favourite but ineffective tool of environmentalists (Dickinson, 2009). Rather it emerges out of a process of spiritual and social formation that can only be communitarian in nature and to a large degree an involuntary function of socialization.

Having said that, Schumacher would never have argued that the metaphysical soil for a re-embedded economy could only be Catholic or Christian. His admiration for both Buddhism and Gandhian Hinduism was genuine and rooted precisely in the conception of natural law that is foundational for Thomist Catholicism. In this respect, he would have agreed with C. S. Lewis in contrasting modern secular individualism with ‘the way’ or the (Buddhist/Confucian) ‘Tao’ (1944).

How a green, distributist and subsidiarist economy would work in practice remains to be seen. Schumacher himself was certainly impressed by the Mondragon cooperative model in Spain (Matthews, 1999) as well as the Scott Bader Commonwealth (Small, 2014, p. 127). Other distributists have pointed to the potential of innovations such as micro-banking and tax reform (Médaille, 2007, 2014). Certainly, Schumacher was never against technology. The idea of intermediate technology was to leverage technical progress for appropriate ends – namely, household oikonomikē rather than abstract economics. For distributists and localist, communitarian greens (and some left libertarians), the pace of technological development and its regulation and deployment by global entities, represents an existential threat (Callahan, 2016; Carson, 2010; Fox, 2015; Storck, 2008). But new technologies such as additive manufacturing (‘3D printing’) and desktop CAD/CNC, distributed innovation, P2P collaboration and open-source design are transforming the landscape of manufacturing and production (Kish et al., 2016). For the first time, small and affordable fabrication technologies are making possible economies of scope that may give small scale, cottage and community-based producers the possibility of competing with large scale conventional manufacture. Kevin Carson has described this as a low-overhead, home-brewed industrial revolution (Carson, 2010). The ‘adjacent possible’ that he describes – of families and households leveraging domestic ‘means of production’ in locally-looped, networked cycles of manufacture and consumption – is essentially a higher-technology vision of distributism. In the 1970s, Schumacher described his intermediate paradigm in terms of $100 USD technology – a means of production available to families. In the twenty-first century, distributists and greens should focus once again on low-overhead ($5000 USD) domestic (re)manufacture systems with supply chains focused on networked households and communities. But this vision of green decentralism cannot work in the absence of an appropriate covenantal metaphysics and interdictory sacred order.

Reaffirming the orthodox Catholic underlay of Schumacher’s theory certainly puts his legacy at odds with the dominant ethos and globalist assumptions of contemporary environmentalism. There is little in Schumacher that resonates with Net Zero targets defined by UN conferences, or EU diktats requiring the culling of national livestock herds to conform with an agreement on methane emissions, nor with the centralization of public health regulations by the World Health Organization. My reading of Schumacher renders him an almost irrelevant figure – at least if the technocratic and modernist version of environmentalism can indeed change the behaviour and aspirations of billions of newly affluent middle-class people. But for those who are sceptical of this agenda, Schumacher’s attention to the formation of virtuous character within self-regulating and place-bound communities seems, ultimately, to provide a more credible route to ecological conscience formation and collective environmental restraint – not as an end in itself, but as a function of a deeper human thriving.

With hindsight, Schumacher’s text speaks to one side of a tension in post-war green politics between a localist sensibility that was anti-modernist on the one hand, and a progressive Enlightenment agenda that was technocratic, Promethean, secular and liberal in both its anthropology and metaphysics. The hegemonic voices of global environmentalism have voted decisively against Schumacher and in favour of a technocratic eco-modernism predicated on a secular universalism. For some, this is an understandably pragmatic response to the perceived existential crisis of climate change. For others, it is driven as much by an unwillingness to let go of the social and technological fruits of modernity. Schumacher’s own universalism was avowedly Catholic, personalist, non-utopian and predicated on the impossibility of ‘solving’ human problems once and forever (because human beings and institutions are imperfect and always prone to corruption). His environmentalism was predicated not on an abstract inculcation of ‘right thinking’ about sustainability, but as a downstream and accidental consequence of the better ordering of human social relations (‘formation’) and the orientation of individuals and communities to the transcendent reality of God. Were he around to comment, Schumacher would see the global solutions of contemporary eco-modernists as being of a piece with Space X, the grandiosity of AI, the horrifying potential of transhumanism and the cultural and psychological vacuum created by the internet – namely, in terms of human potential wrongly ordered by endlessly creative forms of idolatry.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Stephen Quilley

Notes

References

Alexander

(2002). The nature of order. Centre for Environmental Structure.

Al-Ghaili

(2023). Ectolife: The World’s first artificial womb facility. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2RIvJ1U7RE (accessed 17 January 2024).

Arndt

Solomon

Kasser

Sheldon

K. M.

(2004). The urge to splurge revisited: Further reflections on applying terror management theory to materialism and consumer behaviour. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(3), 225–229.

Aroney

(2014). Subsidiarity in the writings of Aristotle and Aquinas. In: Evans

Zimmerman

(eds.) Global Perspectives on Subsidiarity. Springer, 9–27.

Barfield

(1988). Saving the appearances: A study in idolatry. Wesleyan.

Barron

(2016). The priority of Christ: Toward a postliberal Catholicism. Baker Academic.

Bauman

(2000). Liquid modernity. Polity.

Becker

(2014). The denial of death. Souvenir Press.

Belloc

(1936). An essay on the restoration of property. Distributist League.

10.

Belloc

(1977). The servile state. Liberty Classics.

11.

Blond

(2010). Red tory: How the left and right have broken Britain and how we can fix it. Faber and Faber.

12.

Boos

(1992). History and community: Essays in Victorian medievalism. Garland.

13.

Bourdieu

Droit

Ferenczi

(2011) The left and right hand of the state: Interview with Pierre Bourdieu. Variant Magazine. Available at: http://www.variant.org.uk/32texts/bourdieu32.html (accessed 16 February 2024).

14.

Brennan

P. M. K.

(2014). Subsidiarity in the tradition of catholic social doctrine. In: Evans

Zimmerman

(eds.) Global perspectives on subsidiarity. Springer, 29–47.

15.

Burke

(1790). Reflections on the revolution in France. J Dodsley. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15679/15679-h/15679-h.htm#REFLECTIONS (accessed 29 June 2023).

16.

Callahan

(2016). Distributism is the future American Conservative, 11 April. Available at: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/distributism-is-the-future/ (accessed 30 June 2023).

17.

Carlson

A. C.

(2015). The natural family where it belongs. Routledge (Transaction Publishers).

18.

Carson

(2010). Homebrew industrial revolution: A low over-head manifesto. Booksurge Publishing. Available at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-the 35 homebrew-industrial-revolution?v=1620730949 (accessed 16 May 2022).

19.

Catney

MacGregor

Dobson

Hall

S. M.

Royston

Robinson

Ormerod

Ross

(2014). Big society, little justice? Community renewable energy and the politics of localism. Local Environment, 19(7), 715–730.

20.

Centre for New Economics (2023). Curriculum for a new economics. Available at https://centerforneweconomics.org/share/curriculum/ (accessed 17 January 2024).

21.

Chesterton

G. K.

(1927). The outline of sanity. Dodd, Mead & company.

22.

Cole

(1920). Guild socialism. Fabian Society.

23.

Crabtree

(2020). Reclaiming rent, reclaiming the commons. Research-in-Action Community. Schumacher Society. Available at https://researchinaction.schumachersociety.net/pub/v03k5wri/release/2 (accessed 24 Jan 2024)

24.

Daly

H. E.

(2007). Ecological economics and sustainable development, selected essays of herman daly. Edward Elgar.

25.

Deneen

(2018). Why liberalism failed. Yale University Press.

26.

Dickinson

J. L.

(2009). The people paradox: Self-esteem striving, immortality ideologies, and human response to climate change. Ecology and Society, 14(1), 34.

27.

Drengson

Devall

Schroll

MA.

(2011). The deep ecology movement: Origins, development, and future prospects (toward a transpersonal ecosophy). International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 30(1-2), 101–117.

28.

Durkheim

(1960). The division of labour in society. Free Press.

29.

Ehrlich

P. R.

(1971). The population bomb. Ballantine Books.

30.

Elias

(2010). The society of individuals. The collected works of Norbert Elias Vol. 10. University College Dublin Press.

31.

Embery

(2021). Despised. Why the modern left loathes the working class. Polity Press.

32.

Evans

Zimmermann

(2014). The global relevance of subsidiarity: An overview. In: Evans

Zimmerman

(eds.) Global perspectives on subsidiarity. Springer, 1–7.

33.

Extinction Rebellion

(2023). Our demands. Available at https://rebellion.global/about-us/ (Accessed 17 Jan 2024).

34.

Fox

R. A.

(2015). Whatever happened to communitarianism? Front Porch Republic. 8th Sept. Available at https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2015/09/whatever-happened-to-communitarianism/ (accessed 24 Jan 2024).

35.

Geertz

(2017). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic Books.

36.

Gellner

(1998). Language and solitude. Cambridge University Press.

37.

Giddens

(1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Polity Press.

38.

Gill

(2007). Oikos and logos: Chesterton’s vision of distributism. Logos: Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (Saint Paul, Minn.) 10(3), 64–90.

39.

Glasman

(2022). Blue labour. The politics of the common good. Polity Press.

40.

Goffman

(1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. 1st Anchor Books ed. Doubleday.

41.

Goodheart

(2017). The road to somewhere: The populist revolt and the future of politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

42.

Gray

(1993). Post-Liberalism: Studies in political thought. New York: Routledge.

43.

Gray

(2007). Enlightenment’s wake: Politics and culture at the close of the modern age. Routledge.

44.

Green Party. (2019). The Green Party 2019 Manifesto (Green Party, UK). Available at https://www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Elections/Green%20Party%20Manifesto%202019.pdf (accessed 17 Jan 2024)

45.

Guénon

(2001). The crisis of the modern world. 4th, rev. ed. ed. Sophia Perennis et Universalis.

46.

Hahn

McGinley

(2020). It is right and just: Why the future of civilization depends on true religion. Emmaus Road Publishing.

47.

Hajer

M. A.

(2000). The politics of environmental discourse: Ecological modernization and the policy process. Oxford University Press.

48.

Harrington

(2023). Feminism against progress. Regnery.

49.

Hazony

(2022). Conservatism: A rediscovery. Regnery.

50.

Heipel

(2022). Back to school: What rights do parents have? Catholic News Agency, 25 August.

51.

Hess

(2007). The social bonds of cooking: Gastronomic societies in the Basque Country. Cultural Sociology, 1(3), 383–407.

52.

Hickey

(2018). Catholic social teaching and distributism: Toward a new economy. Hamilton Books.

53.

Holland

(2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world. Basic Books.

54.

Holland

(2022). Humanism: A Christian Heresy [Theos Annual Lecture]. Theos Think Tank. Available from https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2022/11/24/theos-annual-lecture-2022-tom-holland (accessed 17 Feb 2024)

55.

Hutchinson

(1997). The political economy of social credit and guild socialism. Routledge.

56.

Huxley

(2004). The perennial philosophy. Perennial Classics.

57.

Ingold

(2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling & skill. Routledge.

58.

Katcherian

J. E.

(2012). Unraveling the paradox: Competence and failure of subsidiarity in the European Union. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35(2), 271–288.

59.

Kimbrell

(2003). Salmon Economics (Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture). Schumacher Centre for New Economics. Available at https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/salmon-economics-and-other-lessons/ (accessed 14 Jan 2024).

60.

Kingsnorth

(2021). The cross and the machine. First Things. June 2021. Available at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine (accessed 20 Jan 2024)

61.

Kingsnorth

(2022). The truth about eco-fascism. Environmentalism has been hijacked by the technocrats. Unherd, 12 November. Available at https://unherd.com/2022/11/the-truth-about-eco-fascism/ (accessed 15 Jan 2024)

62.

Kish

Hawreliak

Quilley

(2016). Finding an alternate route: Towards open, eco-cyclical, and distributed production. Journal of Peer Production No. 9. Available at: http://peerproduction-net.preview1.cp247.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/alternative-route-draft.pdf (accessed 17 Feb 2024)

63.

Kish

Quilley

(2017). Wicked dilemmas of scale and complexity in the politics of degrowth. Ecological economics, 142. Elsevier B.V: 306–317.

64.

Kish

Quilley

(2021). The ecological limits of development: Living with the sustainable development goals. Routledge.

65.

Kohr

(1986). The breakdown of nations. Routledge & Paul.

66.

Kohr

(1992). Leopold Kohr on the desirable scale of states. Population and development review, 18(4), 745–750.

67.

Kollontaĭ

(1920). Communism and the family. The Worker. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm (accessed 17 Feb 2024).

68.

Kollontaĭ

(1971). The autobiography of a sexually emancipated communist woman. Herder and Herder.

69.

Kollontaĭ

(2024). Comrade Kollontaĭ: Writings on sex, family and women’s rights (ed. Featherstone

). OR Books.

70.

Lasch

(1979). The culture of narcissism. Norton.

71.

Lasch

(1986). The communitarian critique of liberalism. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 69(1-2), 60–76.

72.

Leonard

, (2019). E. F. Schumacher and the making of ‘Buddhist Economics,’ 1950–1973. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 41(2), 159–186.

73.

Lewis

C. S.

(1944). The abolition of man, or, reflections on education: With special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools. Oxford University Press.

74.

Loewen

(2021). Mennonite farmers: A global history of place and sustainability. John Hopkins University Press.

75.

Loyal

Quilley

(2013). Wittgenstein, Gellner, and Elias: From the philosophy of language games to a figurational sociology of knowledge. Human Figurations. 2(2) Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.204/--wittgenstein-gellner-and-elias-from-the-philosophy?rgn=main;view=fulltext (accessed 10 Feb 2024)

76.

Macintyre

(2001). Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues. Open Court.

77.

MacIntyre

(2007). After virtue: A study in moral theory. 3rd ed. University of Notre Dame Press.

78.

MacIntyre

A. C.

(2016). Ethics in the conflicts of modernity: An essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative. Cambridge University Press.

79.

Malinowski

(2002). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of melanisian new quinea [Sic]. Routledge.

80.

Matthews

(1999). Jobs of our own: Building a stakeholder society. Pluto Press.

81.

Mead

G. H.

(1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. University of Chicago Press.

82.

Meadows

D. H.

(1974). The limits to growth: A report for the club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. 2nd ed. New American Library.

83.

Médaille

(2007). The vocation of business. Social justice in the marketplace. Continuum.

84.

Medaille

(2014). Towards a truly free market: A distributist perspective on the role of government, taxes, health care deficits and more. Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

85.

Milbank

Pabst

(2016). The politics of virtue: Post-liberalism and the human future. Rowman & Littlefield.

86.

Mol

A. P. J.

Sonnenfeld

(2000). Ecological modernization around the world: Perspectives and critical debates. Taylor Francis.

87.

Morse

J. R.

(2022). The sexual state: How elite ideologies are destroying lives and why the church was right all along. Tan Books.

88.

Novak

(2017). Catholic social thought and liberal institutions: Freedom with justice. Routledge.

89.

Pabst

(2017). Postliberalism: The new centre ground of British politics. Political Quarterly, 88(2), 500–509.

90.

Pearce

(2006). Small is still beautiful: Economics as if families mattered. [Rev. ed.]. ISI Books.

91.

Perry

(2022). The case against the sexual revolution: A new guide to the 21st century. Polity.

92.

Pinker

(2019). Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Allen Lane.

93.

Polanyi

(1944). The great transformation. Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.

94.

Polanyi

(1957a). The economy as instituted process. In: Polanyi

Arensberg

Pearson

(eds.) Trade and market in the early empires: Economies in history and theory. Free Press.

95.

Polanyi

(1957b). Trade and market in the early empires; Economies in history and theory. Free Press.

96.

Polanyi

(1968). Primitive, archaic, and modern economies; essays of Karl Polanyi. Anchor Books.

97.

Polanyi

(1971) Primitive, archaic, and modern economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi / Edited by Dalton

George

. Boston: Beacon Press.

98.

Pope Benedict

XVI

(2009) Caritas in veritate. Papal Encyclical No. 54. (Vatican). Available at https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html (accessed 23 Jan 2024).

99.

Pope John Paul

(1991) Centesimus annus (Vatican). Available at https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html (accessed 23 Jan 2024).

100.

Pope Leo

XIII

(1891) Rerum Novarum (Vatican). Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html (accessed 23 Jan 2024).

101.

Pope Pius

(1931) Quadragesimo anno No 46. (Vatican). Available at https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html (accessed 23 Jan 2024).

102.

Quilley

(2011). Entropy, the anthroposphere and the ecology of civilization: An essay on the problem of ‘liberalism in one village’ in the long view. The Sociological Review, 59(1), 65–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.01979.x.

103.

Quilley

(2012). System innovation and a new ‘Great Transformation’: Re-embedding economic life in the context of ‘De-Growth’. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 3(2), 206–229. DOI: 10.1080/19420676.2012.725823.

104.

Quilley

(2013). De-growth is not a liberal agenda: Relocalisation and the limits to low energy cosmopolitanism. Environmental Values 22(2). Available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3197/096327113X13581561725310 (accessed 17 Feb 2024).

105.

Quilley

(2017). Navigating the anthropocene: environmental politics and complexity in an era of limits. In: Handbook on growth and sustainability. Edward Elgar Publishing, 439–470. DOI: 10.4337/9781783473564.00030.

106.

Quilley

(2019a). Liberty in the (Long) anthropocene: The ‘I’ and the ‘We’ in the longue Duree. In: Kish

Orr

(eds.) Liberty and the ecological crisis: freedom on a finite planet. Routledge.

107.

Quilley

(2019b). Liberty in the near Anthropocene: State, market and livelihood. In: Kish

Orr

Jennings

(eds.) Liberty and the ecological crisis: Freedom on a finite planet. Routledge.

108.

Quilley

(2022) A complete act, conservatism, distributism and the pattern language for sustainability. Challenges in Sustainability, 11(1), 1–14. DOI: 10.12924/cis2022.090100XX ISSN: 2297–6477

109.

Quilley

Zywert

(2019). Livelihood, market and state: What does a political economy predicated on the ‘individual-in-group-in-place’ actually look like? Sustainability (Switzerland), 11(15). Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4082 (accessed 15 Jan 2024).

110.

Regnerus

(2020). Cheap sex: The transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy. Oxford University Press.

111.

Richardson

Shaw

(2001). Research as barefoot wayfaring. Available at: https://researchinaction.schumachersociety.net/pub/ogvugw7d/release/3 (accessed 2 July 2023)

112.

Rieff

(1973). The triumph of the therapeutic: Uses of faith after Freud. Penguin.

113.

Rieff

(2006). My life among the Deathworks. Sacred Order/Social Order Vol 1. University of Virginia Press.

114.

Schumacher

E. F.

(1974). Talk given to the planetary culture and the new image of humanity conference. Centre for New Economics (Lindisfarne Tapes).

115.

Schumacher

E. F.

(2011 [1973]) Small is beautiful. A study of economics as if people mattered. Vintage Digital. Vintage.

116.

Schumacher Institute. (2023). What we think. Available at: https://schumacherinstitute.org.uk/what-we-think/ (accessed 2 July 2023).

117.

Schwab

(2020). Now is the time for a ‘great reset”. World Economic Forum. Available at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/ (accessed 15 Jan 2024)

118.

Scruton

(2013). Green philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet. Atlantic Books.

119.

Senior

(1978). The death of Christian culture. Arlington House.

120.

Siedentop

(2014). Inventing the individual: The origins of western liberalism. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

121.

Simon

(1981). The ultimate resource. Princeton University Press.

122.

Sirico

R. A.

(2014). Subsidiarity and the reform of the welfare of the Nation State. In: Evans

Zimmerman

(Eds.) Global Perspectives on Subsidiarity. Springer, 107–127.

123.

Small

(2014). Small is always beautiful. EF Schumacher and the catholic social perspectives in the twenty first century. Chesterton Review, 40(3), 421–437.

124.

Spretnak

(1984). Green politics and the spiritual dimension Schumacher Centre for New Economics. Available at https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/green-politics-the-spiritual-dimension/ (accessed 15th Jan 2024)

125.

Stites

(1999). Revolutionary dreams: Utopian vision and experimental life in the Russian revolution. Oxford University Press.

126.

Storck

(2008). Capitalism and distributism: Two systems at war. In: Lanz

T. J.

(ed.) Beyond Capitalism and Socialism. IHS Press, 75.

127.

Taylor

(1992). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.

128.

Taylor

(1999). A catholic modernity? In: Heft

A Catholic Modernity? Penguin, 13–37.

129.

Taylor

(2018). A secular age. Belknap Press.

130.

Tönnies

(1963). Community and society. Harper and Row.

131.

Trueman

(2020). The rise and triumph of the modern self: Cultural amnesia, expressive individualism and the road to the sexual revolution. Crossway Books.

132.

Tucker

(2014). Marriage and civilization: How monogamy made us human. Regnery Publishing, Inc.

133.

Turner

(1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

134.

Vance

J. D.

(2017). Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis. Thorndike Press.

135.

Vernon

(2019). The secret history of Christianity: Jesus, the last inkling and the evolution of consciousness. Christian Alternative.

136.

Voegelin

(1987). The new science of politics: An introduction. University of Chicago Press.

137.

Wahrman

(2004). The making of the modern self: Identity and culture in eighteenth-century England. Yale University Press.

138.

Weber

(1978). Economy and society; An outline of interpretive sociology. University of California Press.

139.

Willard

J. A.

(2017). Before Church and state: A study of social order in the sacramental kingdom of St. Louis IX. Emmaus Academic.

140.

World Economic Forum. (2018). What is transhumanism and how does it affect you? World Economic Forum. Available at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/transhumanism-advances-in-technology-could-already-put-evolution-into-hyperdrive-but-should-they/ (accessed 15 Feb 2024).

141.

Zerzan

(2002). ‘Why primitivism?’ The Anarchist Library. Available at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-why-primitivism (accessed 15 Feb 2024)

142.

Zieba

(2014). Papal economics: The catholic church on democratic capitalism, from rerum novarum to caritas in veritate. ISI Books.

143.

Zimmerman

(2008). Family and civilization. ISI Books.