'Growth Fetish', Clive Hamilton

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'Growth Fetish', Clive Hamilton (London: Pluto Press, 2004)

Scary theory rating (1'Janet and John', 10'Jacques et Jean-Paul'): 2.5

Hamilton's an Australian academic and thinktanker. He started off a familiar sixties type, a left liberal with faith in the ability of social liberation movements to make the world a better place by freeing it from the shackles of reactionary conservatism. He's spent the more recent part of his career analysing the way that left liberal pursuit of freedom served the interests of neo-liberal capitalism - even acknowledging the extent to which conservative forces he would still spit at served as a brake on the destructive force of capitalism. He begins to articulate, from a liberal position, the inability of liberalism to provide a moral compass - see his piece 'Can Porn Set Us Free?'

In 'Growth Fetish' he develops the idea that the bankruptcy of mainstream left wing politics results from a refusal to challenge the primacy of GDP growth as a measure of 'well-being'. He argues that 'red' politics has failed to recognise that scarcity is no longer the issue - that the necessary response to deprivation today isn't increased production, but a change of consciousness. He sees hope in the trend towards 'downshifting' in advanced capitalist societies, and argues for the development of a 'politics of downshifting' at a societal level.

In his tour of sociological research on wellbeing, he puts an interesting stress on the importance of a 'sense of meaning and purpose' and the effectiveness of religion (when 'intrinsic' as opposed to 'extrinsic') in providing this - a contrast to a social science orthodoxy which still tends to view religion as anachronistic and/or pathological. (At a more theoretical level, this might be followed up in Slavoj Zizek's discussion of Lacan's 'ritual value', a missing term in the Marxian universe of 'use value' and 'exchange value' - see Zizek, 'Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?')

Overall, 'Growth Fetish' provides a good grounding in many of the most urgent issues we face - and the connections between them. It's a book that deserves to be widely read, certainly more so than a bestseller like Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'. As the quote from Chomsky on the cover has it, 'Right on target and badly needed.'

Check out his website , which has a lot of articles available to download, as well as sections of 'Growth Fetish'.

See also: the Post-Autistic Economics Movement; Jeremy Seabrook; John Gray, 'Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals'.

Balance with: Madeleine Bunting, 'Willing Slaves', which puts far more emphasis on work culture as opposed to the consumer culture; Richard H. Roberts, 'Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences' (scary theory rating: 8.8) on the extension of managerialism as the main threat we face. Though these three analyses can be juggled rather than chosen between.