On land, life, and labour: Abundance and scarcity in Locke, Smith, and Ricardo

As these epigraphs attest, the emergence of economic thought has long been understood by theorists as a crucial development for politics in the modern era. These comments appear in the context of quite different projects. For Arendt, the concern was how what she termed the “social question”—that of the existence of poverty—had informed the development of revolutionary thought and practice since the late 18th century. Foucault, instead, made his observations as part of what he termed an “archaeology of the human sciences,” an investigation that provided crucial foundations for his subsequent—more explicitly political, and today more famous—genealogy of modern “government.” In spite of their divergent aims, the comments of Arendt and Foucault revolve around a remarkably similar constellation of ideas: Both are concerned with notions of abundance and scarcity, and both link this to a discourse on labour. Perhaps less intuitively, both give centrality to new understandings of “life,” Arendt through a critique of how economic analysis placed “the life process of society… at the very centre of the human endeavour” (1977);¹ Foucault by arguing that the emergence of political economy marked the birth of a new kind of political rationality—a “biopolitics” centered around the government of life (see also Foucault, 2008, 2009).²

Although these passages read almost as if they were a continuous commentary, this is something of a sleight of hand. In fact, neither thinker traced Locke–Smith–Ricardo lineage in this way: Arendt did not acknowledge a subsequent shift in liberal political economy marked by Ricardo and the economists of the early 19th century; Foucault, meanwhile, was not here comparing Ricardo to Locke or Smith—though he did address their work elsewhere—but rather to the French Physiocrats. Yet, it is more than a linguistic accident that these comments seem to speak so directly to each other. In fact, the genealogy suggested by the juxtaposed quotes traces an important lineage, though one with which neither Arendt nor Foucault engaged in detail. While not addressing directly the arguments of either of these two thinkers, therefore—the resonances and tensions between which have already been explored in some depth elsewhere (Blencowe, 2010)—this article takes their provocative respective commentaries as a fruitful starting point for tracing a new approach to the development of a modern politics of life.

As insightful as these commentaries are, I seek to go beyond an anthropocentric bias that has been the focus of recent criticism within political theory (Bennett, 2004; Krause, 2016), and for which Foucault in particular has been criticized (Lemke, 2015). What interests me especially is how setting these three canonical discussions side-by-side helps chart the transformation of notions of life, understood not only as specifically human life, but rather in terms of the relationship between humans and the broader panoply of nonhuman life on earth. In short, I suggest that Arendt and Foucault were both right—that Locke and Smith should be regarded as thinkers of abundance, while Ricardo should be seen as a thinker of scarcity—but that making sense of this shift, and its ramifications, requires coming to terms with changing underlying ontologies of nature. While the natural law influence in Locke and Smith's work placed emphasis on the human capacity to adapt the abundance of nonhuman life on earth to meet human ends, Ricardo's modern political economy represented a loss of faith in the essential fecundity of nature, and the ability of humans to overcome environmental limits through technological and sociopolitical innovation.

In order to carry out this investigation, I turn to an important though often overlooked category that was touched on by both Arendt and Foucault, but which was for neither a central focus—that of land. Here, rather than assuming a view of land—more conventional in political theory—as a purely passive “resource” that is subject to appropriation,³ I look at how, within a specifically British tradition of thinking about “improvement” within discourses on government, land acted as a privileged site of the action—even agency—of nature, with property rights forming the principal means through which relations between human and nonhuman life were articulated. In particular, I suggest, contra Foucault, that it was this discourse, which here I trace through the work of Locke and Smith, that was the theoretical precursor to the new “biological” political rationality of which Ricardo's work is emblematic. Viewed in these terms, the birth of 19th-century political economy appears not as the sudden irruption of life into theories of government, but rather a radical schematization of earlier ideas about life, marked by the disavowal of the spontaneous agency of nature, and the hardening of a separation between the human and the nonhuman.

As much as Arendt and Foucault did not focus on land specifically, their respective comments on life, and their shared concern for the concept of labour, still provide crucial guidance. It is well known both that land was the primary object of labour for Locke and that the conceptual affinity between land and labour was foundational to what is often called by economists the “classical economics” of Smith and Ricardo (e.g., Hollander, 2016)—even if, as this article goes some way to demonstrating, the discursive unity that this label implies is one that should be treated with caution.⁴ For both Arendt and Foucault, however, the significance of labour goes beyond both appropriation (traditionally more a concern of political theorists) and the creation of value (traditionally more a concern of political economists) and instead points to more fundamental questions around subsistence, understood as the survival of biological life. While, for Foucault (2009), the political economy of the 19th century embodied a new understanding of man as a “species,” crystallized especially in the concept of “population,” I suggest that this, in fact, represented the disappearance of a view of man as one species amongst many, and the emergence of a new and anthropocentric lens for understanding subsistence that has informed economics to the present day.

The argument proceeds in three sections. The first section addresses the famous chapter “Of property” in book two of Locke's Two Treatises of Government (2017; hereafter TT), emphasizing the ways in which regimes of property are seen to encode shifting relations between humans and nonhuman nature, as well as the important work done here by notions of death and decay. Section two moves to Smith's seminal The Wealth of Nations (2014; hereafter WN), reading the central arguments of the work, and the stadial history on which they hinge, as essentially an elaboration of the schema sketched by Locke, but sharpening the sense of property as articulating relations between human and nonhuman life. Section three turns to a work read by Foucault and others as the quintessential statement of political economy in the early 19th century, Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (2004; hereafter PPET), arguing that its treatment of land in fact represents a radical departure from the Lockean/Smithian schema, inverting ideas about the inherent fecundity of nature, and instantiating a much bleaker reading of human–environment relations. The conclusion returns to a discussion of Arendt and Foucault.

Locke's Second Treatise famously placed questions around land at the heart of a theory of government. Private ownership of land, he argued, was the very basis of “civil”—by which he meant civilized—society, “the chief end whereof is the preservation of property” (TT II.85). His work distinguished itself from that of other major 17th-century legal theorists such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, however, by suggesting that private property rights were derived not simply from the use of land, in a general sense, but specifically from the application of labour in order to better the condition of land for cultivation, an idea understood through the distinctively English concept of “improvement.” It was this argument that required Locke to expand at some length on the nature of this labour, and, by extension, on the relations between human and nonhuman life that it encoded.

For Locke, then, the concept of labour was above all associated with subsistence—understood as the preservation of human life—and it was this irrevocable connection that underpinned justifications for property of all kinds.⁵

Yet, property in land was not an immutable fact of human existence. In fact, the toil of gathering uncultivated wild goods, and the patient industry of agriculture and husbandry represented, for Locke, starkly divergent modes of human interaction with the natural fertility of the earth, associated with very different phases of human social development. In fact, as various commentators have noted, though not developed in detail, Locke's commentary hints at a notion of the development of societal subsistence in distinct stages. Recent scholarship has helped to reveal this by stressing the central role of animal life in Locke's text (Guha-Majumdar, 2020). Such work captures something essential about Lockean property rights: They are expressed first and foremost not merely in terms of the relations between humans that they necessarily imply, but, more fundamentally, in terms of how they articulate modes of relation between humans and a broader web of life on earth. Nevertheless, these arguments can be extended to think not only about animals, but nonhuman life in general, including plants.

This was a central point for Locke—humans had a natural right to appropriate plant and animal life, but only insofar as they could make use of these goods before they spoiled. Property over nonhuman life, that is, could be justified only by the preservation of human life. Anything else was an infraction against natural law, and, indeed—what for him amounted to the same thing—the will of God (TT II.31). The impetus of this natural right carried into his theory of government.

Though frequently overlooked, the chapter on property in fact hinted at another distinct nonsedentary mode of subsistence, that of pastoralism.⁶ The implications of this are not developed by Locke, but it seems clear enough that he saw this as implying quite a different mode of interaction between human and nonhuman life. This described a system based around the domestication of animal life, but “without any fixed property in the ground they made use of,” discussing through biblical examples societies that “wandred with their Flocks, and their Herds, which was their substance” (TT II.38).

For Locke, then, property in land was explicitly understood in terms of the command over plant and animal life that it grants. While appropriation of land was synonymous with “inclosure” (e.g., TT II.33), it was not simply the erecting of boundaries—real or imagined—that interested Locke. Rather, it was the labour expended in improving the land that explained and justified private appropriation of the earth.

Undoubtedly, by “life,” here, he intended specifically human life. Improvement was thus specifically the process of directing a fertility always-already present in nature by directing it toward the production of those goods that met human needs.

This so-called no spoilage proviso was accompanied by another qualification of the right to appropriate land, which suggested that, according to the law of nature, this was only justified if there was “enough, and as good left” for others (TT II.33).

What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that Locke's provisos were immediately nullified by the introduction of money. His well-known proclamation that “in the beginning all the World was America” occurs in the midst of a discussion of commerce and its relation to property and spoilage, and these words are immediately followed by the less well known, “and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known” (TT II.49).

Indeed, though the implications of this change are only hinted at by Locke, it is even possible to suggest that there is at least a hint here of an additional property regime, one which no longer reflected property relations conceived as expressing the form of a society of subsistence cultivators, but which was instead premised on an extended division of labour, and the primacy of commerce.

Although there are doubts amongst scholars regarding the extent to which Locke's comments constitute a stadial history of the kind that came to assume a prominent role in 18th-century thought (Palmeri, 2016), it seems clear that there is at least a nascent sense of distinct regimes of property within the Two Treatises, and also a sense of progress through these regimes.⁸ Most obviously, the development of agriculture is seen unambiguously as superior when compared with the supposed poverty of hunter-gatherer subsistence, allowing the conversion of unproductive “waste” land to productive cropping and husbandry. To the extent that commerce appears—according to Locke's reasoning—to do away with the problem of spoilage, the introduction of monetized subsistence relations appears too as a clear advance.

Here and elsewhere, Locke's writing reveals a concern for the relationship between forms of property and population density at a given stage of development. Later, he clarifies that, “in the Beginning,” though labouring the earth may have provided an original right of property, it was not until “the Increase of People and Stock… had made Land scarce” (TT II.45) that such property rights would have been formalized through a kind of compact between men.

Value was created by improving the natural fertility of the land, directing it toward the fulfillment of human needs. In this way, Locke was able to argue that private appropriation, far from diminishing the resources available for others, actually served to increase what he termed “the common stock of mankind” (TT II.37).⁹

Foucault suggested that it was only somewhat later that saw the sudden irruption of “life” into theories of government, with a new concern for humanity considered as a “species.” But in fact Locke already thought in terms of a human species, using the term explicitly throughout the Two Treatises (e.g., TT II.79), and embedding ideas of population dynamics deep within his political theory. To an extent, he had inherited such a way of thinking from the natural law tradition.¹⁰ But in Locke's hands, and especially modulated by English ideas of improvement, this was sharpened into what was already a clear, if still nascent, account of the historicity of human subsistence relations, understood in terms of relations to nonhuman nature. It was this, most importantly, I suggest, that he bequeathed to a tradition that would subsequently give rise to modern political economy.

Within The Wealth of Nations, the only direct references to Locke are to other writings on currency, with Locke appearing here as one of Smith's “mercantilist” adversaries.¹¹ Nevertheless, it is clear that Smith was well aware of the content of the Two Treatises, as is evident from the surviving records of his Lectures on Jurisprudence (Meek et al., 2014; hereafter LJ) delivered during his tenure at Glasgow University.

Yet, he rejected the applicability of a “labour theory of property” beyond the most primitive forms of appropriation.¹¹ Smith's work also diverged from Locke in the crucial respect that it jettisoned the notion of a distinct “state of nature.” In this view, as Foucault aptly noted of the work of Smith's Scottish contemporary Adam Ferguson, “civil society is an historical-natural constant for humanity” (Foucault, 2008). Rather than theorizing a transition from a “natural” state to a “civil” one—which for Locke required positing an instantiating contract between men—Smith instead sought to explain a more gradual development of social institutions.¹²

Nevertheless, as significant as these differences might be, focusing on them detracts from broader continuities in the overall scope of their arguments, specifically around land and property. Locke's defense of private property had hinged on the claim that, by encouraging the improvement of the earth, this institution served to increase the “common stock of mankind.” Although pointing to supposed examples, in the form of a contrast between the few “conveniences” afforded to Native Americans and the many to day labourers in England, he stopped short of attempting any kind of analytical demonstration of exactly how private property and improvement would increase societal wealth. Nearly a century later, however, Smith attempted precisely such a demonstration.

Within the literature, this parallel has been noted most forcefully by Hont and Ignatieff (2010), who found in both Locke and Smith's work a recognition of an apparent “paradox of commercial society”—as they put it, why was it that a modern society which did not return the whole produce of labour to the labourer provided a better standard of living to the very poorest than the societies of the past? Smith's answer, though developed in much more detail and at vastly greater length, paralleled that already suggested in Locke's Treatises: private property in land, and the improvement that this engendered, was understood as the foundation of a productive societal order based around commerce and an advanced division of labour that ultimately increased resources for all.

It was not only these central concerns that the two shared, but also their mode of reasoning by appeal to a conjectural history of human development. In particular, the central place of improvement within The Wealth of Nations led Smith to place a similar emphasis on the ways in which different regimes of property expressed and mediated relations between human and nonhuman life.¹³ Whereas a sense of societal stages remained largely implicit in Locke's work, in Smith's a stadial history was fully formed. This was laid out in the greatest depth in his Lectures, where he had instructed students explicitly that, “[t]here are four distinct states which mankind passes through:—first, the Age of Hunters; secondly, the Age of Shepherds, thirdly, the Age of Agriculture; and fourthly, the Age of Commerce” (LJ(A) i.27), but the same understanding plays a central role also within The Wealth of Nations.¹⁴

For Smith, this innovation enabled pastoralists to support a far greater number of individuals on “the same extent of equally fertile territory” (WN IV.vii.c.100). And yet the concentration of animals in a single space necessitated that a shepherd “should frequently change his situation, or at least the place of his pasturing, to find pasture for his cattle” (LJ(A) i.48–49).

Through this direction, “the labourers and labouring cattle” (WN II.v.12) were able to produce well in excess of their own subsistence, allowing the further extension of a division of labour, as expressed, in particular, in the historical divide between the agricultural countryside and the trade- and manufacturing-oriented towns (WN III).

And yet, as Smith was also keenly aware, especially looking at the condition of parts of his native Scotland, agriculture too raised its own problems in relation to the direction of nature's fertility. In particular, soil could quickly become “entirely exhausted” (WN I.xi.k.3) without careful attention, and the feudal property regimes that had dominated across Europe—and which, for Smith, provided the archetype of the agricultural stage of society—had provided cultivators with neither the resources nor the incentive to maintain the condition of land (WN III.ii). It was this question, in fact, that lay at the heart of Smith's tentative optimism regarding the prospects of a burgeoning fourth, “commercial” stage of society.

But, as he observed, with progressive enclosure and conversion to commercial farming, such “unimproved wilds” (WN I.xi.b.6) were diminishing, decreasing the availability of various subsistence goods, and thus raising their exchangeable value, creating incentives for landowners to convert land specifically to commercial forestry or pasture.

By increasing the exchangeable value of animals and increasing conversion of land to pasture, the rise of commerce thus offered new opportunities for improved farming practices. What Smith envisioned, then, was that commercial society would continue to enhance soil fertility until a point at which the “compleat improvement and cultivation” (WN I.xi.k.12) of the country had been reached, at which point it would be “fully peopled” (WN I.ix.14). For Smith, it was not only agriculture that would benefit. Rather, this improved direction of the earth's fertility was the foundation for the advancement of human industry in general and the increase of societal wealth (Steeds, 2022).

Here, as in Locke's work, population appeared as the key driver of evolving property relations (Smith, 2020). Each successive societal stage represented, for Smith, an improvement in the mode of relation between human and nonhuman life, such that a greater human population could be sustained, and, indeed, with ever greater access to the “necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life” (WN I.v.1). In this way, his argument, albeit elaborated in far more detail, paralleled central threads of Locke's thought around property.

However, while Smith's argument can be read, and indeed has been, as putting forward at least an implicit justification of private property in land,¹⁵ as a work of political economy the main conclusions of the text operated on another level, addressing what Smith termed matters of “police.” Key to his intervention in this respect was his introduction of a theory of capital. While his stadial theory suggested that the “natural” course of societal development was one in which the rise of commerce would lead to the improvement of land, Smith's argument was that the misguided policy of European states to date had frustrated this process, through misguided attempts to privilege high-value manufacturing exports in the hope of bringing bullion into the territory. This, he suggested, had held back investment in agriculture, slowing the progress of improvement. His famous promotion of the “natural liberty” (WN IV.ix.51) of the market was premised on the idea that removing government attempts to steer industry would provide the surest means to encourage the natural progress of land improvement and the increasing abundance that this engendered. It was this idea that the growth of capital should be a central focus of government that was to set the direction for political economy in the nineteenth century.

Like Locke and Smith, Ricardo put forward an argument that accorded questions around land and improvement a central place. As in Smith's political economic text, the only direct reference to Locke in Ricardo's Principles is to his work on currency (PPET, 369), but unlike Smith, there is no evidence that Ricardo was also familiar with the Two Treatises. The influence of Smith is unambiguous, however, and indeed much of the work is set up as a response to The Wealth of Nations.

This preface accordingly outlines a number of distinctly familiar themes, from a concern for agriculture and the way that the “produce of the earth” is realized by labour, to the notion of “different stages of society” and the way that these affect the returns to the labourer (PPET, 5). Indeed, sufficiently closely does Ricardo follow a number of Smith's key concepts that the two have frequently been read by many economists as elaborating essentially continuous lines of analysis.¹⁶

And yet, as others have noted, in many ways Ricardo's work represents a distinctively new discursive formation (Tribe, 1978). His distance from Smith is reflected most obviously in their respective conclusions. Smith's cautious optimism about commercial society was founded on the assumption that the dynamics leading to the improvement of land would benefit all sections of society. While acknowledging that the wages of the labouring class would tend toward a bare subsistence rate, for Smith, the prognosis for the foreseeable future was that increasing societal wealth would tend to ameliorate their condition too, at least until an inevitable “stationary state” was reached at some distant point in the future (WN I.viii.43). Ricardo, instead, was far less convinced that a rising tide would lift all boats, or, indeed, that the high tide was so far away.

This divergence from Smith's conclusions hinged on a quasi-mathematical argument that claimed to demonstrate that Smith had failed to understand the distributional implications of population growth in a market system. Like Smith, Ricardo assumed that wages would always tend toward a subsistence rate, but he followed the inflection of this idea popularized by his friend Thomas Malthus, which emphasized that the class of labourers—which acted as a proxy for population in general—not only would tend to increase as the demand for labour rose but would also decrease as demand fell, suffering what Malthus had termed the “positive checks” of privation (PPET, 94). For Ricardo, this appeared straightforwardly as an aspect of what he termed the “laws” of distribution in a market system, and even well-intentioned attempts to ameliorate the condition of the poor were ultimately doomed to be counterproductive (PPET, 105–109).

What concerned him above all was not the condition of the poor, however. Rather, it was the impact of a human population pressing against the limits of available land area on the accumulation of capital, and its potential to bring a halt to societal progress. One of Ricardo's central arguments was that Smith had misunderstood the nature of agricultural rents. Smith had argued that these were the payment for a kind of surplus generated by the action of nature. In agriculture, he had suggested, “nature labours along with man” (WN II.v.12)—rents were thus payment for “the produce of those powers of nature, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer” (WN II.v.12).

Ricardo's argument was that, as the population grew, ever less fertile land would be brought into cultivation, and, as this happened, the owners of more fertile land would find themselves able to charge higher and higher rents to farmers for its use. Simultaneously, the cultivation of ever less fertile land would demand increasing application of inputs, in the form of labour and capital, in order to derive the same product. These two effects would squeeze the profits of the farmer until they reached zero (PPET, 120–121). Since Ricardo assumed the profits of capital to equalize across all industries, the alarming consequence was that, as the population increased, profits would decline to zero, and the accumulation of capital would come to a grinding halt (PPET, 120–121).

Ricardo's text did more than simply offer alternative conclusions to Smith, however. Discretely, and perhaps unwittingly, it refounded the discourse around land on quite different theoretical foundations. Unlike Locke and Smith, Ricardo was not concerned to defend the link between private property in land and improvement. In fact, within the Principles, property rights received barely a mention, other than to affirm that the security of (private) property was a “principle which should ever be held sacred” (PPET, 204). Rather, property rights formed an assumed prerequisite of the more specific distributional analysis Ricardo undertook. This represented a fundamental shift in the terrain of analysis, dispensing with the whole jurisprudential framework within which Locke and Smith operated, reconstituting in its place an analysis of production conceived as a self-contained sphere of human activity.

Foucault seems to have recognized the discursive shift in Ricardo's text when, in his earlier work, he read Ricardo as marking the completion of an epistemic break, representing the birth of the modern political economy. While he paid little attention to the questions around land, property, and nonhuman life that are the focus here, his brief comments are nevertheless remarkably insightful. As he noted in the passage quoted at the beginning of the article, what, for Ricardo, “makes economics possible, and necessary… is a perpetual and fundamental situation of scarcity” (Foucault, 2002). For Foucault, this new understanding pertained to “the biological properties of a human species” (Foucault, 2002). As we have seen, however, thinking in terms of a human species was far from a novelty at the time Ricardo wrote, but rather an integral part of the tradition on which, through Smith, he drew heavily.

It is not, then, the sudden irruption of life into a discourse on government that defined the transformation heralded by Ricardo's work. In fact, explicit discussion of humans as a species disappeared, appearing not once within the Principles. With the vanishing of property as an explicit focus, the idea of stages of societal subsistence that I have suggested played such an important role in Locke and Smith's work retreated too. While Ricardo did gesture toward the notion of societal stages, this was purely vestigial, being divested of any substantial content. What loose appeal he did make to the idea of stages was restricted exclusively to thought experiments related to the labour theory of value (PPET, Chapter 1) and the progress of land rents (PPET, 112). His theory, in other words, was concerned solely with the dynamics of a market economy, and any consideration of human subsistence beyond this was entirely beyond the purview of analysis.

This was in fact only one of two important senses that the concept of labour continued to operate in Ricardo's work. As we have seen, the other was as a shorthand for the class of labourers, which in turn served a crucial theoretical role as a proxy of population in general. Yet, what Foucault's comments do brilliantly capture, if only implicitly, is the loss of a third meaning of labour that was even more important for both Locke and Smith. This was labour understood as the direction of the earth's natural fertility.

This vastly narrowed perspective is crucial to the transformation of understandings of land and life. Foucault, while largely overlooking questions about nonhuman life and the environment more broadly, nevertheless seems to have put his finger on the essential quality of this shift. For Locke and Smith, the relationship between labour and the earth was one of the human direction of a fertility always-already present—even abundant—in nature. Indeed labour, for both, as the foundation of all property, appeared as a mode of relating to the earth. Their perspective situated this as a natural part of the behavior of the human species, and one that situated the human, certainly in a position of dominion, but within a broader sphere of life on earth.

There was a decisive change in Ricardo's work. What had disappeared was a faith in nature's essential fertility and adaptability to human ends that had previously served to keep in check—for both Locke and Smith—the direst implications of a system of competitive market exchange. This loss of faith in nature's essential abundance marked an inversion of the Smithian schema. Competition no longer ensured abundance but was rather an inevitable outcome of a perpetual and unending condition of scarcity. Improvement was no longer the means of fitting nature's inherent abundance to man's needs, but rather a merely temporary means of forestalling the inevitable resurgence of insufficiency. Crucially, labour no longer appeared as the means to achieving an abundance for all. Rather, absent the overarching conviction that societal institutions would act to mediate relations between humans and the earth, such as to achieve an equilibrium, labour appeared much more starkly as the only means by which the individual could hope to triumph another day over scarcity.

In the Ricardian framing, property, therefore, appeared no longer as a way of mediating and indeed mitigating environmental limits. Instead, property was a given, and it was the market that assumed in a radical fashion the role of arbiter of the proper level of population, determining life and death for the labouring class. Land, certainly, appeared as necessary to sustain the life of the labourer, but no longer as the site of the interaction with nonhuman life. Though “productive,” it was essentially inert, lacking any “spontaneous” agency. For Ricardo, societal productivity was not conceived, as it had been for Locke and Smith, in terms of the direction of the fertility of nature, through the management of plant and animal life, as mediated through relations of property. Considering the longer history of human subsistence appeared as no longer relevant within this frame of reference; rather it was the market economy that appeared as the sphere in which a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all pertained. The rather grim conclusion was that the lot of man could not be bettered. All that could be wished for was the continued accumulation of capital, in the hope that the growing availability of basic subsistence goods could continue to outrun population, at least for the foreseeable future.

Arendt's claim that ideas of abundance arose from the colonial experience is true in a double sense. Firstly, for both Locke and Smith, it was precisely the contrast between the supposed poverty of indigenous inhabitants of North America, in particular, and the burgeoning world of capitalist commerce that provided the sense that poverty could be overcome by reconfiguring relations between humanity and the nonhuman world—especially through property, and private ownership of land in particular. Secondly, that same assumed profusion of uncultivated, “unclaimed” land that represented the poverty resulting from a lack of improvement simultaneously promised immense abundance if the life that it encompassed could only be subjected to the rigors of commerce.

Foucault was also right that political economy, such as it emerged in the 19th century marked a radical disjuncture in understandings of life in the domain of government, but he failed to link new understandings of population to this earlier tradition. While for Locke and Smith, human life was understood through its relation to the rest of life on earth, and labour, as a concept, was crucially associated with the direction of a natural earthly fertility that was always-already abundant, this was not the case for Ricardo. As Foucault noted, in Ricardo's world, the human condition was one of being confronted by a constant and fundamental scarcity, in the face of which individuals must labour in the hope of forestalling the inevitable confrontation with environmental insufficiency. As he also noted, this was a world that was essentially barren, save for the action of labour (and specifically paid labour).

The genealogy traced here, therefore, helps to make sense of the suggestive but underdeveloped comments of both Arendt and Foucault on notions of abundance and scarcity, and puts them productively into conversation. The findings counter a recent tendency to assume that early modern philosophers such as Locke held a view of nonhuman nature as simply “dead matter” (Krause, 2016), instead tying this view to a tradition of economics that arose around the turn of the 19th century, of which Ricardo was the leading exponent. More broadly, the investigation contributes to placing contemporary debates around environmental limits in longer perspective and hopes to stimulate further interrogation of the environmental ideas that have informed the development of modern political thought.