The “ Walden Paradox”: Is Sufficiency Anti-economic?

Le « paradoxe Walden »: la vie sobre est-elle anti-économique ?

Anne de Rugy
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Anne de Rugy: LIPHA - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d'étude du Politique Hannah Arendt Paris-Est - UPEC UP12 - Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne - Paris 12 - Université Gustave Eiffel

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Abstract: This article focuses on sufficiency from the point of view of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), based on his experience of living in the middle of nature, in a self-built cabin at Walden Pond, for just over two years. This narrative of a life devoted almost entirely to leisure (walking, swimming, reading, writing...) thanks to a strict limitation of his needs leads to the " Walden paradox". Indeed, on the one hand, Thoreau, as a man of the woods, appears as the perfect economic man who evaluates his satisfaction and achieves an economic trade-off between uses of time to make the most of it. On the other hand, in order to live as he prefers, he must distance himself from society and be opposed to his fellow citizens' life principles that represent comfort and progress. A detour via the thinkers of the advent of capitalism leads us to solve the paradox of a sober lifestyle opposed to the dominant economic and social order, and yet conform to a formal meaning of economics. Indeed, the representation of a free and rational economic agent doesn't correspond to the historical reality of capitalism that Max Weber showed not to be based on free will or the pluralist lifestyles it claims to defend, but rather on work ethic and on the valorization of wealth, which characterize a capitalist subjectivity. The spirit of capitalism isn't either based on a pluralist conception of interest − instead, as Albert O. Hirschman showed, it has gradually been identified with a conception reduced to wealth's accumulation. Sufficiency thus constitutes a break through economic and social order, criticizing in practice a dominant form of life and its founding principles.

Keywords: Sufficiency; Voluntary Simplicity; Economic Man; Henry David Thoreau; Criticism; Spirit of Capitalism; Sobriété; Simplicité volontaire; Homo oeconomicus; Théorie critique; Esprit du capitalisme (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Published in Lien social et Politiques, 2024, 93, pp.64-84. ⟨10.7202/1115788ar⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04965325

DOI: 10.7202/1115788ar

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