The expression "freedom of limits" seems, at first glance, to contain a contradiction: How can our freedom be guaranteed by the limits that we ourselves set upon it?

In the context of the dominant culture of our time, which advocates for endless economic growth and views expansion and gigantism as the destiny of modern societies, limits indeed appear as an external constraint that we are constantly called to overcome.

However, reality is merciless: the depletion of natural resources, agricultural and food crises, pandemics, climate change, and even wars that bring back the specter of nuclear destruction compel us to rethink the concept of limits and their freedom.

George Kallis – with a narrative that is intensely personal and stripping the notion of limits of the ominous connotation that Malthusianism has attributed to it – defends the vision of a different world, one that finds its freedom within limits.

Drawing examples from ancient Greek experience but also from Eastern traditions, from 19th-century Romantics to the contemporary ecological movement, and from feminism to the recent trend of degrowth, he highlights the need for modern Western individuals to dissolve the fantasy of unlimited growth intertwined with the dominant consumer model and to embrace the idea of self-restraint or, better yet, self-definition; in the face of an uncertain future, progress means collectively realizing our limits.