The ideology of economic growth

The ideology of economic growth, and its philosophical construction. A talk by Dr Gareth Dale

The ‘growth paradigm’ — i.e. the postulate that economic growth is good, imperative, essentially continuous (even limitless), and the principal remedy for a litany of social problems — is ubiquitous today. For all their differences, Liz Truss and Keir Starmer shared the (specifically triplicate) mantra: ‘growth growth growth.’ Yet in historical terms the domination of growth ideology is recent. The growth paradigm is unique to modernity. This paper will briefly touch upon what is involved in the suggestion that economic growth be understood as ideology, before, in its main part, turning to examine the seventeenth-century emergence and consolidation of growth ideology, paying particular attention to philosophers and economic thinkers. In concluding, the question of ‘degrowth’ will be broached.

Gareth is Associate Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences. He worked at Birkbeck, the LSE, and Swansea University before joining Brunel University in 2005. His most recent books are the edited collections Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age (Haymarket 2021) and Exploring the Thought of Karl Polanyi (Agenda 2019). In 2016 he published Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (Columbia UP) and Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation and Critique (Pluto), and Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings (Manchester UP), and a critical appraisal of ‘Green Growth’ strategies (Zed Books), and The Politics of East European Area Studies (co-edited; Routledge). His earlier books were on Karl Polanyi (Polity, 2010), the political economy of Eastern Europe (Pluto), migrant labour in the European Union (Berg), and a trilogy on East Germany: its economic history, protest movements, and 1989 revolution (Peter Lang, Routledge, and Manchester UP).