Abstract

This article depicts early nineteenth-century liberal thought as the source of the modern Western ideological view of nature. Highlighting the views of David Ricardo, T. R. Malthus, and particularly John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, this view is depicted as dialectical in nature – on the one hand as evincing recognition of the environmental price resulting from increasing industrialization, but on the other as recognizing that this price, though deplorable, was nevertheless unavoidable and necessary. Moreover, early liberals also recognized that it was precisely increasing mastery of nature which enabled an appreciative attitude toward nature to emerge, a point which was later emphasized in modern scholarship. Nineteenth-century liberal thought can thus be viewed as the source for recognizing a key aspect of present-day thinking about the human-nature relationship – the dilemma between the need to utilize nature and to conserve it.

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