The Sustainable Development Theory: A Critical Approach, Volume 1: The Discourse of the Founders

Introduction

Chapter I: The avatars of sustainability: A necessary prolegomenon

I.1. Why is it important to look back to the founders?

I.2. Sustainable development: everything and nothing

I.3. How do we understand the Brundtland Report?

I.4. What is sustainability? The sustainability-durability-resilience kit.

Chapter II: Classical insights in support of sustainability

II.1. Work division and human cooperation - fundamental determinants

II.2. Social harmony in an economically stratified world.

II.3. The institutionalism of economic order at the classics:

            II.3.1. Job description for the invisible hand

            II.3.2. Informal institutions of an open economy: money, market, and property.

II.4. Work, accumulation and profit in the preface to the economy of happiness. The exception of the happy abstinence of J.S. Mill

II.5. Competition in the free market and the origin of bubble-free GDP.

II.6. Does economic geography matter? Ricardo and Malthus: the physical limits of development

II.7. Moral responsibility in Adam Smith's language

Conclusion: An Adamist economy: a sustainable vision.

Chapter III: How sustainable are the neoclassics?

III.1. Sustainability does not agree with:

1.1.        Homo economicus rationalis and his environmental void

1.2.        The supply and demand pendulum with limitless resources: A macro economy for an ideal world.

III.2. Fulcrums:

2.1. Pareto or what each generation deserves

2.2. Two sentences from Walras:

2.2.1. There are no ideal sustainability models

2.2.2. Economic efficiency is nothing if it is not social as well

2.3. Drifts towards environment sustainability: A. Marshall, A.C. Pigou

Chapter IV: The social strain: reversed causalities and the risk of weakening the lesson on sustainability

IV.1. When social peace undermines the logic of sustainability

IV.3. Reassigning the development paradigm in the area of distributive justice

IV.3.1. Distribution before production: The workplace promise

IV.3.2. Pikettism or the pathos of quantitative levelling

IV.4. Market social economy of sustainability

Conclusions: Redistributive justice: a Trojan horse of unsustainability

Chapter V: Founder benchmarks in environmental economics

V.1. Whose land is the "mother of wealth"? What means the physiocracy today?

V.2. Why is the classical Marxist preoccupied with pollution and resource exhaustion?

V.3. The reasonable pessimism of Ricardo and Malthus                                              

V.4. Marshall and Pigou: The pollutant has to pay.

Conclusions: The environment as an implicit preoccupation of economic growth

Chapter VI: Decrease - a logical inadequacy

VI.1. Between hypocrisy and law-like necessity

VI.2. Is Mill a predecessor of decrease?

VI.3. The seductive logic of decrease: Nicolae Georgescu-Roegen

VI.5. Towards a new consumption dialectic

Chapter VII: Validation of the classics: Long term sustainability

VII.1. Schumpeter, Kuznets, Davos. A new face of "creative destruction"

VII.2. Evidence of classical lesson confirmation

VII.2.1. Development via workshop instead of commercial company

VII.2.2. Demand or offer - a false problem

VII.2.4. Deflation, entrepreneurship and sustainability

Conclusion: In a long term we are not all dead

Chapter VIII: New opportunities for sustainability in a globalised world

VIII.1. What does emergent sustainability rely on?

VIII.2. Commitment to future generations in the context of mass migration

VIII.3. Nationalism and sustainability

VIII.4. Moral debt and the colours of globalisation

Conclusion: What it means to be sustainable in the 21^st century