Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

‘Our forests and great commons make the poor that are upon them too much like the Indians,’ wrote the Quaker John Bellers in 1695; ‘[they are] a hindrance to industry, and are nurseries of idleness and insolence’. Lord John Bishton, author of a 1794 report on agriculture in Shropshire, agreed: ‘The use of common lands operates on the mind as a sort of independence.’ After enclosure, he wrote, ‘the labourers will work every day in the year, their children will be put out to labour early,’ and ‘that subordination of the lower ranks of society which in the present time is so much wanted would be thereby considerably secured.’ In 1771 the agriculturalist Arthur Young noted that ‘everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious’. The Reverend Joseph Townsend emphasised in 1786 that ‘it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour’. ‘Legal constraint,’ Townsend went on, ‘is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise … whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions … Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.’