Author: Pierre Charbonnier

Pierre Charbonnier is a French philosopher and CNRS researcher at Sciences Po's Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics. His work examines how political ideas about autonomy, equality, and democracy depend on material conditions and relationships with the environment. Affluence and Freedom, translated into English by Andrew Brown and published by Polity, develops that inquiry through a history of modern political thought viewed from an ecological perspective. The book follows changing connections among prosperity, liberty, and resource use, then asks how democratic aspirations might be reworked under ecological constraints. It grew from Charbonnier's French-language Abondance et liberté, issued by La Découverte. Charbonnier moves between philosophy, history, and social science to show why environmental questions belong inside political analysis rather than at its margins. Alongside this book, his research addresses environmental social science, political ecology, and the intellectual history of collective life. That combination places Affluence and Freedom within both contemporary ecological debate and the longer history of political concepts.