Concept
Autarky
Overview
Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states, and their economic systems.
Autarky as an ideology or economic approach has been attempted by a range of political ideologies and movements, particularly leftist ones like African socialism, mutualism, war communism, communalism, swadeshi, syndicalism (especially anarcho-syndicalism), and left-wing populism, generally in an effort to build alternative economic structures or to control resources against structures a particular movement views as hostile. However, some right-wing ones, like nationalism, conservatism, and anti-globalism, along with even some centrist and religious movements (such as Islamism), have also adopted autarky, generally on a more limited scale, to develop a particular industry, to gain independence from other national entities, or to preserve part of an existing social order.
Proponents of autarky have argued for national self-sufficiency to reduce foreign economic, political, and cultural influences, and to promote international peace. However, economists who support free trade instead argue that protectionism has a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare, whereas free trade and the reduction of trade barriers have a positive effect on economic growth and economic stability.
Autarky may be a policy of a state or some other type of entity when it seeks to be self-sufficient as a whole, but it also can be limited to a narrow field such as possession of a key raw material. Some countries have a policy of autarky with respect to foodstuffs (such as South Korea), and water for national-security reasons. Autarky can result from economic isolation or from external circumstances in which a state or other entity reverts to localized production when it lacks currency or excess production to trade with the outside world.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
States what Autarky is.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the…
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
States what Autarky is.
The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a small number of very rich men. Those who are not capitalists have, almost always, very little choice as to their activities when once they have selected a trade or profession; they are not part of the power that moves the mechanism, but only a passive portion of the machinery. Despite political democracy, there is still an extraordinary degree of…
Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals
Close in meaning to Autarky; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Autarky
Related ideas
- Yale University Press
- India
- Iran
- Ancient Greek
- Islamism
- Isolationism
- Murray Bookchin
- Spring and Autumn period
- Mutualism (economic theory)
- Spanish Civil War
- Stoicism
- Warring States period
- Vietnam
- Sage (philosophy)
- Nazi Germany
- North Korea
- Nationalism
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Charles Fourier
- Russia
- Syndicalism
- Soviet Union
- South Korea
- Treaty of Versailles
Place in the tradition
Part of Chinese philosophy.