The French Revolution provides a roadmap for social transformation
Transformation or collapse — they’re the options open to humanity at a crossroads that will define our future. Transformation involves redesigning society to achieve sustainability — a destination where human needs are met within environmental limits. Fail, and we’ll hurtle towards collapse, a future of unimaginable pain, suffering and chaos as a hostile environment incapacitates governments and our ability to maintain thriving societies. In other words, creating sustainable societies isn’t an option, it’s a requirement. But how does one transform a society?
That’s the part not everyone agrees on. The conventional approach centres on incremental change. The thinking is that millions of small changes will combine to eventually transform society onto a sustainable path. Post-growth economic thinking argues incremental change doesn’t go far enough. What’s required is a social transformation and the redesign of society (and the economy) around sustainable principles.
So which line of thinking is correct? In the French Revolution, we have a blueprint for social transformation that can help answer that question.
The Enlightenment
The French Revolution triggered a radical redesign of society that created a capitalist, liberal democratic state. The system that now dominates Western culture.
It’s not possible to understand how the revolution took the shape it did without thinking about the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment became increasingly influential in Europe in the eighteenth century. It was distinctly secular, and there was a belief that nothing was beyond rational improvement.
Underpinning Enlightenment thinking was a deep commitment to the idea of progress. This commitment was a product of scientific discoveries that provided an increasing ability to shape the world to our benefit.
At the same time, the rise of the bourgeoisie in France coincided with the development of capitalism, which had been stimulated by the opening up of colonial empires in early modern Europe. The impact of Enlightenment thinking was that it strengthened the bourgeoisie’s consciousness as a class.
The Ancien Régime
By the eighteenth century in France, the bourgeoisie had taken the lead in finance and commerce. But the growth of capitalism, which formed the basis of bourgeoisie power, was held in check by the feudal social structure that dominated pre-revolutionary France.
The feudal social order was known as the Ancien Régime or the Old Order. Enlightenment thinking contradicted the Ancien Régime for two reasons. Firstly, the foundation of French society was a belief in the divine spirit — that God chooses the monarch as his representative on Earth. This belief acted as the glue that bound society together. The Enlightenment’s belief in a secular, natural account of the world directly questioned the divine spirit.
Secondly, the French social order was structured around various privileged corporate bodies (who were exempt from paying tax). The Enlightenment thinkers took issue with this discriminatory social structure, insisting on applying a reasoned approach to human affairs based on the idea each person is born equal.
While Enlightenment thinking contradicted the Ancien Régime the elite did embrace elements of Enlightenment thinking. But crucially, how enlightenment thinking was embraced was constrained by the rules governing the Old Order. Any changes couldn’t question the position of the king as an absolute monarch, nor could it question a system of privilege. The very elements of French society that the Enlightenment directly questioned.
On top of this, the French feudal system was incompatible with the development of capitalism. As Tony Spybey puts it in Social Change, Development and Dependency, capitalism necessitates liberty in all of its forms;
“personal liberty as the condition permitting the emergence of a workforce of wage-earners; liberty of property to guarantee its free mobility and disposal; intellectual liberty as the necessary condition for the pursuit of scientific and technological discovery.
What this meant was that Enlightenment thinking and the rise of capitalism could only influence society within very specific constraints that didn’t undermine the underlying rules of the game. For Enlightenment thinking and capitalism to start dominating, feudalism needed to be abolished.
Collapse and redesign
That’s what happened with the collapse of the Old Order which sparked the French Revolution in 1789. Now, it’s vital to note that the Old Order did not collapse due to the Enlightenment, nor due to the rise of the bourgeoisie or any single event.
Lots of factors contributed to its demise, but the nail in the coffin was that the Ancien Régime had to make radical reforms to avoid bankruptcy. To do so, it had to make changes to the parts of the system that could not be changed because it would have undermined the position of the elite. And so the Ancien Régime collapsed in on itself due to internally sown seeds of destruction.
The vital point is that before the revolution, Enlightenment thinking and the development of capitalism were, as Karl Marx puts it in The Civil War in France, “clogged by all manner of mediaeval rubbish.” The revolution acted as a broom that swept feudalism away and created a landscape from which the Enlightenment could redesign society in its image. It took the collapse of the Old Order to enable it to do so.
Environmentalism
So what does the French Revolution have to do with the critical crossroads that will define humanity? Well, there are plenty of resemblances between the French Revolution and the present.
For starters, environmentalism has become increasingly influential. Its influence globally has coincided with our increased understanding of the environmental impacts of capitalism. Environmentalism questions the merits of a system that is so environmentally destructive and only sees value in the things that can be converted into products and services at a profit.
Environmentalists argue that to save humanity from environmental disaster we must create societies that work in harmony with the natural world. Capitalism, driven by the profit motive, is incapable of achieving such a society.
This argument is reinforced by economic ideas that question the sustainability of capitalism. Post-growth economic ideas are based on the premise that we must design regenerative economies that support human well-being within environmental limits. The only way to do so is to give up economic growth as a development path.
This suggestion is radical because economic growth is the core belief of capitalism. Economic growth has led to miraculous increases in living standards for many and modern society has been designed in service of this belief. Growth is so vital to the integrity of capitalism as a system, that capitalism will collapse if growth isn’t maintained.
That’s rather problematic because post-growth economics argue growth can’t be sustained for two reasons. First, a growing economy requires ever-increasing throughputs of energy and resources to increase production and consumption. Since 1971 the demands we make on the Earth to produce the goods and services we then use to support our lifestyles exceed what Earth can supply. This situation is known as ecological overshoot.
Overshoot has accelerated over time as our collective ecological footprint has increased. We now require 1.75 Earths to provide for our wants and needs as a species.
The impacts of overshoot are catastrophic. Overshoot has led to a climate crisis. It has led to the annihilation of life on Earth, which is why we are the first species to have ever triggered a mass extinction event. It has ravaged ecosystems, which is why the Amazon rainforest is on the verge of dying.
Secondly, the energy laws governing nature mean that an economy that demands never-ending growth will eventually hit resource limits. This is the central argument made in the 1972 publication, Limits to Growth, which argued that if population, resource use, and pollution kept increasing on our finite planet, eventually, economies would face environmental limits to growth, precipitating collapse sometime in the twenty-first century.
Sustainable development
While post-growth economics directly contradicts capitalism, elements of environmentalism are being embraced by governments and companies in the form of sustainable development.
Sustainable development is a set of loose ideas that can, so it’s believed, allow us to deal with three crucial prongs simultaneously. Reduce environmental impacts, end poverty, and maintain a thriving economy.
Sustainable development is focused on incremental change that seeks to tweak and adapt capitalism, not replace it. It does not question the sustainability of economic growth or call for transformative systems change, nor does it see the need for it.
The issue with capitalism is that it can only embrace sustainability in ways that complement the underlying belief in economic growth. No matter how capitalism wears sustainability, if the cause of unsustainable outcomes continues to go unquestioned, the economy will continue getting bigger, we’ll continue to make overshoot worse, and environmental impacts will continue to increase.
Similarly to the Ancien Régime, the parts of the system that must be adapted to avoid collapse, are the parts of the system that can’t be adapted because doing so would undermine the position of the elite. We are living in a system that has inadvertently sown the seeds of its destruction.
Collapse and redesign
The current state of affairs may seem disparaging, but in just the same way as in pre-revolutionary France, we are locked into a social construct that means collapse has become necessary to create the conditions where a redesign of society becomes possible.
As hard as it may seem, we’re now playing a waiting game. That’s not to say we all need to sit tight and wait for the right conditions for a redesign to occur. When we are inundated by environmental and economic shocks, it’s the preparations we make now that will be fundamental in determining what shape societies take then.
All of the research, all of the protests, all of the thought-provoking questions, all of the pioneering business approaches, every person who is dedicating their life work or making sacrifices for the cause of creating a sustainable society; it all matters. Every contribution will prove fundamental in supporting the rebuilding of sustainable societies when the opportunity arises. The future of humanity depends on it.
