Limits to Social Growth or Limits to Privilege?

I will offer here some thoughts about a recently published book by Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth. The title seems to place the book in the framework of debates over the physical “limits to growth,” but its subject bears no relation to them, except insofar as it shares a pessimistic view about the future of a liberal market economy sustained by “growth” strategies. There is also a difference in analytical method: the limits to physical growth are usually seen as barriers imposed by increasing scarcity of nonrenewable resources, and by the threat of environmental catastrophe to capitalist economies. Analytically, such limits lie outside the growth process itself. Hirsch rejects the concerns over the “limits to growth” as misplaced. He argues that such limits do indeed exist, but lie within society, not outside it. They are engendered, not by resource scarcities, but by the contradiction of the expanding availability of material goods...