A Not so "Stationary State": John Stuart Mill's Sustainable Imagination

This chapter examines the development of the concept of the 'Stationary State' in published work, correspondence and practical activism. It considers how John Stuart Mill refined his ideas of it, how that thinking coincides with a trajectory set out by Ulrich Grober and, consequently, how Mill's reflections and elaborations on the 'Stationary State' speak to a growing preoccupation with sustainability in the environmental humanities, social sciences and literary studies. The idea of sustainability germinated in the exploration of practical and emancipatory solutions to the problem of how humans could sustain themselves as the project of modernity continued on its relentless way. The sustainability also derived from a subsequent deliberation as to how human activity— land use, industry, development, social structures, politics— should answer to this independent and unceasingly dynamic nature. Recent critical discussions about sustainability have critiqued its dubious co-option into a 'business-as-usual' framework and explored the rhetorical possibilities of the term.