In the last century, the story of history’s progress was built on the idea that it would pass through a series of stages of material development. These stages were fixed, predetermined, and similar regardless of place, culture, or past history. This story indicated a path from underdevelopment to the happiness of an efficient, democratic market economy.

Various benchmarks were proposed along the way: the supposed results of material production. But the real criteria of success were not the spread of education, the status of women, literacy, human life expectancy, the fate of animals, or even the quality or life span of the products that we use. For most branches of political thought, all these were just automatic by-products of growth and the flow of goods and money.

Until the beginning of the new millennium, almost no political camp had taken stock of the inherent contradiction in this way of seeing things: its quest for infinite demand in a world of finite resources. This objection surely did gain traction in the human and physical sciences, but both right-wing politics and the traditional left shrugged their shoulders.