Book

The argument of this book can now be stated in a single sentence: a free and just civilization must organize its economy, institutions, technologies, and culture around the shared reproduction of the conditions of life. Everything else follows from this claim, although none of it follows automatically. The claim is simple because it begins from an evident dependency. It is difficult because the dominant institutions of modernity have been organized around a different image: that the economy is a self-expanding order of production, accumulation, and exchange; that politics is principally the regulation of relations among human actors; that nature is a resource, a background, or an external constraint; and that the future is a field of claims that can be priced in the present.