ABUNDANCE. In 2025 two American journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published a book on the failures of progressive Liberalism – a quasi-manifesto for a second Democratic administration that failed to materialise in 2024.

At the centre of their critique was the claim that progressive politicians in the U.S. have become too focused on the ‘demand-side’ of the economy – at the expense of building ‘supply-side’ perspectives, policies or programs – when tackling structural issues of inequality: work, housing, health, climate, etc. Progressives, they argue, have sought to ‘manage scarcity’ through regulation and redistribution, rather than building infrastructure, housing, or new technologies. Their case-studies focus on Democratic states – primarily New York and California – seeking to demonstrate how governments made ineffective by ‘excess regulation’ and a ‘fear of growth’ have fed into a desire for populist autocrats (like Trump).

Insofar as it expresses a concrete political program, the book promotes a reorientation within the American soft-left away from a ‘A Consumers’ Republic’ into a kind-of ‘YIMBY’ (Yes in my Back Yard) paradise. Their slogans read: “A Liberalism that Builds”; “Move Fast and Break Things”; “Scarcity Is a Choice”. Short-form explainers produced by Klein lambast, for example, the endless meetings of housing associations, local administrations, and special interest groups. In the introduction to the book, they outline a day in the life of this future Liberal utopia:

...across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills [...] these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit. Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth, where it’s saved millions of lives and billions of healthy years. [...] Electric cars and trucks glide down the road, quiet as a light breeze and mostly self-driving. [...] Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. [...] Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared...

Needless to say, their writing – and the political ‘movement’ it has come to represent – has divided opinion. In summarising their vision, Klein and Thompson write:

There is a word that describes the future we want: abundance.

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Unfortunately, abundance is not – in itself – a particularly interesting word. Etymologically it is derived from the Latin abundō (to overflow) – today captured in the term ‘abound’ – and abundantia (plenty, or ‘fullness’), moving through Old French abondance into the Middle English of the c14th as, variously: ‘aboundance’, ‘habaundance’ and ‘abundaunce’. Throughout this journey the term seems to have taken up a semantic relationship with ‘wealth’ and ‘affluence’ – the OED notes a particular association with ‘riches’, ‘material goods’ and ‘possessions’ from the c13th at least – which is a subtle, but differentiating factor from synonyms which simply identify a ‘great number’ of something. For example, in Medieval Latin abundō became, at one stage, a technical term for investing surplus capital (liquidity, it seems, having always been inherent to finance).

Perhaps, then, it would be more interesting to ask how ‘abundance’ might have integrated itself into the vocabulary – the mindsets, and moral economies – of Middle English speakers in the c14th? One of the earlier examples of the term’s use given by the OED appears in a c15th translation, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, of De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) itself written in the c6th by Roman philosopher Boethius. The text is framed as a dialogue – produced while the author awaits his execution – between Boethius and a speculative ‘Lady Philosophy’, who helps him find peace not through an ‘habundaunce of þinges’ but rather virtue, and a rational (Platonic) understanding of God and nature. In the text, roughly modernised from Chaucer’s translation, Lady Philosophy argues:

But what do you desire from Fortune with so great a noise and so great a fuss? I believe you seek to drive away need with an abundance [habundaunce] of things. But certainly it turns out all the contrary for you. For certainly it requires very many supports to maintain the variety of precious possessions. And truly it is that those who have many things have need of many things, and conversely, those who measure their satisfaction according to the needs of nature and not according to the excess of covetousness have need of little.¹

So perhaps – contra-Klein-and-Thompson – the pursuit of material wealth, the desire for abundance, actually creates more needs rather than resolving, or reducing them? That those who have many things, have need of many things? This was a question which occupied much of Chaucer’s work and life, born – as he was – during what British historian M.M. Postan once described as ‘the great breeding season of English capitalism’. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) were written, for example, after the Black Death (1348), the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), and during the expansion of London’s merchant classes (London’s ‘Company of Merchant Adventurers’ received a royal charter in 1407) as well as the general dissolution of Feudal service, and its replacement by contractual rental arrangements.

In his book Words in Time, Geoffrey Hughes (who draws on Postan’s work) shows how Chaucer used changes in language to draw attention to these shifting semantic and moral economies:

While Chaucer mentions the main demographic catalyst, the Black Death, only twice, en passsant, his subtle deployment of shifting value-terms among morally different characters in the Prologue [to the Canterbury Tales] shows his sharp awareness of the growth of an acquisitive, competitive, profit-oriented ethos. The central notion which is changing is that of profit. The traditional formula of commune profit (found in many a statute, ordinance and proclamation) is that of ‘the well-being of the community’, a sense upheld by his idealized Knight, Parson and Plowman in their lives of dedicated service. But commune profit is giving way to private profit, just as common weal was to give way to private wealth.²

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, to hear the suggestion – via Wiktionary – that the Norman ‘abundance’ displaced the native Old English ‘ġenīht’, a word that simply meant ‘enough’!

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Yes, quite enough! So, what’s the point here? That what abundance’s etymology represents is – once again – King Harold’s failure on Battle Hill (1066)? The capitulation of an Old English world? Of Christianity? Of the Peasants’ Revolt? Of a moral code bound in honour, chivalry and asceticism when faced with the world-historical force of the profit motive? Hopefully, one does not need to be nostalgic for feudalism to question – or reject – an ‘abundance mindset’...

In her book Post-Growth Living, British philosopher Kate Soper echoes both Chaucer and Boethius – as well as Klein and Thompson – in her analysis of the ‘moral economies’ at work within critiques of contemporary techno-capitalism. In Abundance, for example, the American authors write:

Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford.

And, Soper follows:

Left-wing critics of capitalism have been more bothered hitherto about the inequalities of access and distribution that a consumer society creates than about how it confines us to market-driven ways of thinking and acting.

However, while for Klein and Thompson, the failure of progressivist policies focused on ‘access’ – over ‘production’ – represents a need to ‘build baby build!’ for Soper it reflects precisely the opposite. She continues: “...I submit, there are essentially two opposing responses on the left at present: the technological-utopian, and the alternative hedonist.”

Reflecting on Hughes’ historical analysis, we might say that ‘alternative hedonism’ is to ‘abundance’ what the ‘commune’ is to ‘profit’; not so much a rejection, as a means of rethinking the foundational logic – the incentives, ideological and material commitments – at the root of a system of politics, production and exchange. What is the ‘good life’? What could it be? Soper continues:

Unlike the more alarmist responses to climate change, alternative hedonism dwells on the pleasures to be gained by adopting a less high-speed, consumption-oriented way of living. Instead of presaging gloom and doom for the future, it points to the ugly, puritanical and self-denying aspects of the high-carbon lifestyle in the present.

Who is the real ascetic? The orthodox believer? Those whose most utopian image of the future remains constrained within the expansion of consumption based technologies, or those able to dream beyond the need for new needs? In the concluding remarks to her introduction of Post-Growth Living, Soper writes:

Orthodox Marxists may object, but those working within a broadly historical materialist framework of thinking must now encompass the politicisation of consumption, rather than restricting their focus to production and worker exploitation. [...] ‘An abundance of needs’, ‘distribution according to needs’ – heady though such slogans may be, they can no longer figure as appropriate summations of what could be achieved under socialism.

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This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. “...but what desirest þou of fortune wiþ so greet a noyse and wiþ so greet a fare ¶ I trowe þou seke to dryue awey nede wiþ habundaunce of þinges. ¶ But certys it turneþ to ȝow al in þe contrarie. for whi certys it nediþ of ful many[e] helpynges to kepen þe dyuersite of preciouse ostelmentȝ. and soþe it is þat of many[e] þinges han þei nede þat many[e] þinges han. and aȝeyneward of litel nediþ hem þat mesuren hir fille after þe nede of kynde and nat after þe outrage of couetyse” https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ChaucerBo/1:6?rgn=div1;view=fulltext ↩

2. “... Chaucer pointedly applies these profiteering senses to the corrupt or venal ecclesiastics.” Words in Time, p.63 ↩