How climate change will affect our political theory - for better and worse
Geoff Mann is Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy, Simon Fraser University. He is the author most recently of In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution. Joel Wainwright, associate professor at Ohio State, is author of Geopiracy and Decolonizing Development, which won the Blaut award.
A welcome addition to a small but growing body of climate writing
on the left. It's a book explicitly aimed at understanding the
political dimensions of climate change instead of relegating them
to a paragraph or two in the concluding section.
*Alyssa Battistoni, Nation*
In the face of the contemporary ecological crisis, can sovereignty
maintain the absolute character that has defined it from the
beginning and continue the mediatory functions that modernity
attributed to it? And how can national sovereignty deal with that
global crisis? Can 'political realism' address the themes of
ecological crisis? These are some of the thorny questions that Joel
Wainwright and Geoff Mann confront in this book. Bringing down the
Leviathan seems the only possible response. The nature of the
problem is clear, and its solution is a struggle we have to
win.
*Antonio Negri*
Urgent, provocative and elegantly executed, Climate Leviathan
provides a map for climate politics in the stormy decades ahead. As
the boat rocks ever more violently and we seek to set the compass,
this work will be of foundational importance.
*Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital*
Here is the political theory for climate justice we've been waiting
for: penetrating, politically committed, accessible. Climate
Leviathan should be read, and debated, by everyone concerned about
capitalism, climate, and justice.
*Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life*
A crucial intervention into the philosophical debates about climate
change. Climate change forces us to question the self-evidence of
our thinking about politics. If capitalism persists and cannot stop
climate change, where is the world going? No one can predict the
future. But Climate Leviathan offers a bold and brilliant map of
our prospects.
*Kojin Karatani, author of The Structure of World
History*
To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some
idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly
changing environment. Climate Leviathan argues that rapid climate
change will transform the world's political economy and the
fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted.
The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying
eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical
alternatives truly imperative.
*Climate & Capitalism*
An intelligent and thought-provoking read.
*Forsight*
The framework offered by Climate Leviathan helps pose our political
questions in a new register, with the appropriate gravity and
urgency of standing at a crossroads of our planet's natural
history.
*International Socialist Review*
If Neoliberalism is the God that failed on climate change, what
juvenile gods will it spawn? This is the question taken up by Geoff
Mann and Joel Wainwright in Climate Leviathan, in which they
repurpose Thomas Hobbes to sketch out what they see as the
likeliest political form to evolve from the crises of warming and
pummeling of its impacts.
*David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story
of the Future*
Unlike many books on climate politics, Climate Leviathan is neither
apocalyptic nor prescriptive. It is exactly what its subtitle
promises: 'a political theory of our planetary future,' at once
speculative and wide-ranging.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
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