Just Enough: The History, Culture and Politics of Sufficiency

This book fosters a wide-ranging and nuanced discussion of the concept of ‘enough’. Acknowledging the prominence of notions of sufficiency in debates about sustainability, it argues for a more complex, culturally and historically informed understanding of how these might be manifested across a wide array of contexts. Rather than simply adding further case studies of sufficiency in order to prove the efficacy of what might be called ‘finite planet economics’, the book holds up to the light a crucial ‘keyword’ within the sustainability discourse, tracing its origins and anatomising its current repertoire of usages. Chapters focus on the sufficiency of food, drink and clothing to track the concept of 'enough' from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. By expanding the historical and cultural scope of sufficiency, this book fills a significant gap in the current market for authors, students and the wider informed audience who want to more deeply understandthe changing and developing use of this term.

Table of Contents:
Part I.- 1. Introduction- Samuel Randalls and Matthew Ingleby.- 2. Enough: A Lexical-Semantic approach- Kathryn Allan.- Part II.-  3. Enough-ness in the later Middle Ages- Hannah Skoda.- 4. Daily Bread: Ideas of Sufficiency in Early Modern England- Ethan Shagan.- Part III.- 5. Sufficiency and Simplicity in the Life and Writings of Edward Carpenter- Wendy Parkins.- 6. ‘These are the cases who call themselves “moderate drinkers,” because they are never seen embracing a lamp-post.’ The problem of moderate drinking in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain- James Kneale.- Part IV.- 7. Fashion acolytes or environmental saviours? When will young people have had ‘enough’?- Rebecca Collins.- 8. What would a sufficiency economy look like?- Samuel Alexander.

About the Author :
Matthew Ingleby is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous published works include G.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity (Bloomsbury 2013), Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment (British Library Publishing, 2017) and the upcoming Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). His research focuses on the cultural meditation of urban and coastal space in the nineteenth century.  Samuel Randalls is a Lecturer in Human Geography at University College London and has previously co-edited a four-volume reader on Future Climate Change (Routledge, 2012) and the Handbook of the Political Economy of Science (Routledge, 2017). His research focuses on the historical, contemporary and future relationships between environments, businesses/economics and science.