Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Abundance, Part I

For months, I’ve been trying to fumble my way toward a coherent theory of what it means to be a YIMBY or “abundance progressive.” I don’t mean that in the sense of figuring out our policy platform; there is no shortage of abundance-inflected policy manifestos out there, including one or two that I’ve helped write.1 What remains somewhat under-theorized is the first principles stuff. The YIMBY rank and file includes DSA members, resistance libs, doctrinaire libertarians, #nevertrump Republicans, centrist technocrats, and more than a few adherents to more bespoke, esoteric political tendencies. So how does abundance politics fit together as a shared intellectual project?

It may be tempting to say: it doesn’t. There is no shared philosophy here, just a strategic alliance to get some more homes built. But I don’t think that’s strictly accurate. It doesn’t explain the conversations I’ve been having with abundance types from various points on the left-right political spectrum. For a while, it’s been hard for me to avoid the feeling that some kind of deeper synthesis is taking place.2

This post and the ones that follow are my attempt to describe the nature of that synthesis and what I think it means. I don’t think every YIMBY or self-identified member of the abundance movement will agree with the argument I’m about to lay out, but I hope it will provoke some fruitful discussion. I’m still figuring all of this out myself, so what follows is less a mature theory of history than a series of notes gesturing in that direction. Think of it as a draft I’ve submitted for the first round of peer edits.

As you might expect, all this means that the next few posts are going to be even woolier than usual. They’re also going to take my pretty far afield of the small patch of intellectual territory where I’m reasonably proficient, in the hopes that real experts will offer productive corrections. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Let’s start with definitions. From here on out, I’m going to refer to YIMBYism/abundance politics using the umbrella term “abundance liberalism.” By liberal, I don’t necessarily mean left of center. Instead, I’ll use “abundance liberals” to describe people who are committed to both the abundance project and to liberal democracy.3 While “abundance illiberals” exist, I’d argue they’re a fringe element in the abundance ecosystem.4 Abundance liberalism does a decent enough job of describing the movement overall.

As you’ll see later on, I think abundance liberalism is a quintessentially modernist project — maybe the most important modernist project in American politics right now. So before we go any further, we should try to define “modernism” as best we can.

That’s what I’ll try to do over the remainder of this post. I’ll be relying on the work of two seminal Marxist thinkers: the philosopher Marshall Berman and (to a lesser extent) the historian Eric Hobsbawm. While not a Marxist myself, I’ve come around to the idea dialectical materialism is one of the better frames for thinking through the meaning of modernity. Frances Fukuyama — an elder statesman of the abundance liberals, and someone I’ll be citing heavily in future posts — uses a similar approach, although he draws more from Hegel, Marx’s forebear, than from Marx himself.

Berman and Hobsbawm offer two complimentary approaches to thinking about modernity: where Hobsbawm tells the story of the technological, social, political, and economic transformations that brought us into the modern world, Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air relates how major artists and intellectuals have grappled with the experience of being modern. In each case, modernity is conceived as something holistic and even all-consuming: a fundamental shift in human reality.

The title of Berman’s book is, of course, a quote from the Communist Manifesto. Here’s the full “all that is solid melts into air” quote in context:

This is as good a definition of modernity as any. It is the condition of near-constant cultural, political, economic and technological upheaval that has convulsed most of the human world for the past four or five centuries. It began with the emergence of the modern state and the corresponding growth of sophisticated international finance markets.5 It accelerated with the birth of liberalism, the formation of a mass public, and the subsequent age of revolution. Then came the industrial revolution and the discovery of hydrocarbon fuel’s awesome, terrible power.

Another way of thinking about this is through Hobsbawm’s “dual revolution”: the extraordinary period of time that gave us the French Revolution and England’s Industrial Revolution. The former could reasonably be called the birth of modern mass politics; the latter represents the point when humanity broke through the old constraints on its productive capacity. While Hobsbawm is careful to point out that neither revolution came out of nowhere, both represent a violent escape from the laws that had seemingly governed human history up to that point.

Modernity has transformed virtually every aspect of human life, usually more than once. Hydrocarbon power removed Malthusian limits on economic growth and human flourishing; liberal and socialist ideology fueled attempts at remaking society anew; states developed the ability to enslave, murder, and make war at an unprecedented scale. Within the past several decades, humanity has obtained the technical capacity both to leave the planet and to drive itself extinct.

Berman divides the modern era into three distinct phases. Phase One (which corresponds very roughly to what historians call the early modern era) runs “roughly from the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth.” Phase Two kicks off with the French Revolution and runs up to the start of the twentieth century, where Phase Three begins.6

All That is Solid Melts Into Air was first published in 1982. Few could have imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse into ruins within the next decade. While I’m not sure what Berman thought of that collapse (he died in 2013), I’m going to argue that it inaugurated modernity’s Phase Four.

In Phase One, Berman writes, “people hardly know what hit them … they have little or no sense of a modern public or community within which their trials and hopes can be shared.” But after the French Revolution, the public “shares the feeling of living in a revolutionary age, an age that generates explosive upheavals in every dimension of personal, social and political life.” They still, however, “can remember what it is like to live, materially in spiritually, in worlds that are not modern at all.” As Phase Three begins, “the process of modernization expands to take in virtually the whole world.” But the twentieth century is where modernization hits its limits:

Berman is underselling the twentieth century here. Later in All That is Solid, in his chapter on New York City, he discusses the New Deal: a modernist project if there ever was one. While not exactly revolutionary, the New Deal represented the most fundamental shift in the American government’s relationship to its citizens since the Second Founding.7 During the same era, radicals on the left and right engaged in far more ambitious modernist experiments abroad. Liberal democracy, Communism, and fascism offered mutually exclusive visions of modernization’s endpoint.

The Communist and liberal democratic states won World War II, and the liberal democratic states won the Cold War. This brings us up to the beginning of Phase Four, when there was seemingly one version of political modernity left standing. I’ll talk more about that phase in my next post.