In writings completed shortly before he died, in particular Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch developed a rich and suggestive analysis of the political dilemmas confronting the affluent consumer societies of the advanced capitalist world. His work was part of a broad and pessimistic reassessment of the economic and political prospects of western capitalism following upon the onset of new economic difficulties in the 1970s.

This mood contrasted sharply with the considerable optimism and complacency about the future of the capitalist economy and the legitimacy of its political institutions that existed in the 1950s and early 1960s. The principal threat faced by western capitalism at that time was generally perceived as an external one – the militancy and economic challenge of the Soviet bloc. The internal problems appeared to have been overcome. No one expressed this mood better than Seymour Martin Lipset in a famous passage in Political Man:

These lines were written in the middle of the longest and most rapid period of expansion that the capitalist world economy had ever experienced. In the 1930s neither the friends nor the enemies of capitalism could envisage a new period of sustained expansion. The ideologies of left and right were starkly opposed. Even those, like Keynes, who believed there were better ways to manage capitalism to avoid under-employment of resources did not foresee an early return to economic growth. The key economic and political question was mass unemployment and whether it should be blamed on workers’ resistance to wage cuts, on the capitalist organisation of production, or on the mistaken policies of financial orthodoxy pursued by governments.