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This article takes stock of the current literature on neoliberalism and discusses its conceptual benefits, challenges, and avenues for further research. In particular, the article focuses on the transnational network around the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) and its activities in marketing the marketization of formerly non-market spheres. Rather than taking for granted pre-existing shared norms, interests, and principled beliefs, this focus helps us understanding the importance of long-term transnational intellectual efforts to develop, shape, prioritize, and generalize specific perspectives and preferences that predated the societal changes associated with the neoliberal ‘counter-revolution’ against planning and the de-commodification of the welfare state. After setting out key advantages of this research agenda, the article provides a rough sketch of the MPS, its structures, evolution, and transnational think tank network. The article ends with a short example of such a transnational network approach in studying the unmaking of the Bretton Woods monetary system.

Scholars and activists mobilize increasingly the term degrowth when producing knowledge critical of the ideology and costs of growth-based development. Degrowth signals a radical political and economic reorganization leading to reduced resource and energy use. The degrowth hypothesis posits that such a trajectory of social transformation is necessary, desirable, and possible; the conditions of its realization require additional study. Research on degrowth has reinvigorated the limits to growth debate with critical examination of the historical, cultural, social, and political forces that have made economic growth a dominant objective. Here we review studies of economic stability in the absence of growth and of societies that have managed well without growth. We reflect on forms of technology and democracy com-patible with degrowth and discuss plausible openings for a degrowth transition. This dynamic and productive research agenda asks inconvenient questions that sustainability sciences can no longer afford to ignore.

Bibliographie: Schmelzer, Matthias: Degrowth und Postwachstum, PERIPHERIE, 2-2018, S. 336-339. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v38i2.14

The call for 'sustainable degrowth' has recently turned into a focal point of critical social and ecological debate, as well as a framework for diverse strands of activism. So far, little is known about the motives, attitudes and practices of grassroots activists within the degrowth spectrum. This article presents results of a survey conducted at the 2014 International Degrowth Conference, revealing both the presence of a widely shared basic consensus among respondents and their broad division into five distinguishable sub-currents. A cluster analysis shows that degrowth provides a framework for a diversity of critical and transformational approaches. We identify and describe five such currents: eco-radical sufficiency-oriented critics of civilisation; moderate immanent reformers; a transitory group of voluntarist-pacifist idealists; the modernist rationalist Left; and the alternative practical Left.

Basierend auf Foucaults Subjektivierungsanalysen, theoretischen Kategorisierungen von Wachstumssubjekten und einer empirischen Erhebung stellt der Beitrag Überlegungen zu Elementen möglicher »Postwachstumssubjektivitäten« an. Wir argumentieren, dass der Alternativvorschlag der Degrowth-Bewegung an die Stelle des wachstumsgesellschaftlichen Individualismus ein wesentlich relationales Selbst-Verständnis setzt; anstelle stetiger Steigerung von Weltreichweite wird die Etablierung weniger, aber stabiler Resonanzachsen angestrebt; und statt individueller Durchsetzungsfähigkeit geht es um Konvivialität als praktischen Modus der Erreichung dieses Ziels.

This article re-examines a contested chapter in the international and environmental history of the 1970s. Even though largely neglected by historical research and in the public memory, the Club of Rome – widely remembered for its 1972 report The limits to growth – was not only born within the OECD, but was also in its early period strongly influenced by debates within this think tank of the industrialized countries. Using previously overlooked sources, this article analyses this highly unlikely OECD–Club of Rome nexus. It not only offers a privileged view into the social history of international policy-making and the related personal entanglements and ideological transfers at a key moment of post-war history. It also demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and economic turmoil of the late 1960s prompted a rethinking of the economic growth paradigm, even within those technocratic institutions that had aspired to guide the post-war industrial growth regime. The article argues that these links are not only vital for our understanding of the relationship between acquisitive growth capitalism and environmentalism, but also enable a more profound understanding of the role of transnational networks in global history and the appreciation of the place of the 1970s in world history.

‘Economic growth’ is widely regarded as a key goal of national and international economic policies, not only across the political spectrum but also in all countries, and it has been dubbed the most important idea of the twentieth century. Yet, how did the pursuit of economic growth become a key priority taken for granted among social scientists, politicians, and the general public? Building on studies of the so-called Post-Development school and focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organizations, the article offers a source-based and transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. After setting this analysis in the context of the current debate about the relationships between GDP, welfare, and environmental sustainability and after introducing a definition of the growth paradigm, the article sketches its historical (re)making in postwar history by focusing on four entangled discourses. These claimed that GDP, with all its inscribed reductions and exclusions correctly measures economic activity, that its growth serves as a magical ward to solve all kinds of often changing key societal challenges, that growth was practically the same some of the most essential societal ambitions such as progress, well-being, or national power, and that growth is essentially limitless.

When, how and why did the expectation of exponential economic growth emerge historically? This article explores this question through a transnational historical analysis of economic and policy-making expertise within the debates of the industrialized countries’ think tank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its predecessor, the OEEC. It focuses in particular on the setting of growth targets in the years 1952, 1961, and 1970. These targets not only illustrate the escalatory logic of exponential growth but also highlight the changing concepts, justifications, and implications that mark the (re-)making of the economic growth paradigm at key junctures in postwar history.

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: the end of economic growth in long-term perspective Iris Borowy and Matthias Schmelzer 1 Seventeenth-century origins of the growth paradigm Gareth Dale 2 Growth unlimited: the idea of infinite growth from fossil capitalism to green capitalism Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil 3 The end of gold? Monetary metals studied at the planetary and human scale during the classical gold standard era Andrea Westermann 4 Gross domestic problem: how the politics of GDP shaped society and the world Lorenzo Fioramonti 5 Development and economic growth: an intellectual history Stephen Macekura 6 Economic growth and health: evidence, uncertainties, and connections over time and place Iris Borowy 7 An incompatible couple: a critical history of economic growth and sustainable development Jeremy L. Caradonna 8 Sustainable degrowth: historical roots of the search for alternatives to growth in three regions Barbara Muraca and Matthias Schmelzer Index

This chapter focuses on some key passages in the longer-term history of the precursors and roots of the current degrowth alternative along three main ideal-typical paths: the English-speaking critique of economic growth; the Southern European degrowth perspective; and the German discussions about alternatives to growth. Skepticism of economic growth and the search for alternatives are on the rise. The English-speaking debate on economic growth has particularly been shaped by ecological economists. The Southern European tradition has a very broad thematic focus that not only includes social, economic, and environmental issues, but also strongly emphasizes the cultural dimension and issues of democracy and autonomy and – at least in some currents – a quite radical questioning of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity. The German strand of growth critiques has been particularly shaped by the strong sustainability debate critiques of green growth, and by its organizational base in the environmental and anti-globalization movements.

This chapter proposes a historical framework for understanding the OEEC/OECD. After presenting key modes of governance, it provides an overview of the organization’s trajectory since 1948. The periodization we propose is linked to the mandates of successive Secretary-Generals, dates that coincided with deeper transformations of the organization’s set-up, tasks, and overall outlook: The OEEC’s focus on reconstruction and European integration (1948–1961), the OECD as the center of Atlantic cooperation and Keynesian growthmanship (1961–1969), the crisis-ridden 1970s and the OECD’s shift of economic ideology of neo-liberalism (1969–1984), the deepening of liberalization and the search for a post-Cold-War role (1984–1996), and the focus on enlargement and the management of globalization (1996–2016). The conclusion discusses the OECD as a (geo)political platform, expert think tank, and identity-generating Club.

1984 wurde der sogenannte Wirtschaftsnobelpreis an Richard Stone fur „bahnbrechende Leistungen bei der Entwicklung von volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungssystemen“ vergeben. Das Bruttoinlands- bzw. Bruttosozialprodukt (BIP bzw. BSP) ist nicht nur die wahrscheinlich „machtigste Zahl der Welt“ (Fioramonti 2013), sondern liefert auch die Grundlage fur empirische Wirtschaftsanalyse und wachstumsorientierte Wirtschaftspolitik.