Self-Sufficiency as a Political Virtue: Agency and Responsibility in the Age of Technology

Contemporary political philosophy has devoted extensive attention to technology, risk, and governance, yet it has paid little attention to the role of everyday material practices in shaping political virtue under industrial conditions. This paper argues that an increased degree of self-sufficiency, understood as domain-sensitive reduction of market reliance, should be recovered as a political virtue for technologically mediated societies. While acknowledging the benefits of industrial society like abundance and health security, the paper diagnoses how large-scale production and radical division of labour generate social exploitation, ecological harm, and individual alienation. Calibrated self-sufficiency is defended as a practical response that reduces social and ecological complicity while preserving opportunities for materially engaged agency and forms of activity that may be conducive to flourishing. The argument frames self-sufficiency as a context-sensitive optimization strategy, demonstrating that this orientation is universalizable without requiring social withdrawal or technological regression.