OTPO 1095 - Nature and History in Political Thought

Global warming and the ecological crisis introduce issues that play out on timescales previously unconceived in politics. Spanning generations, or even ages; being acute but also slowly unfolding, these issues don't fit with short-term elections cycles or the mid-terms of economic forecasts. There is thus a challenge to bring time scales of modern democracy in relation to larger developments. One way to explore this matter is to investigates the temporal dimensions of our political concepts. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck and J.G.A. Pocock have argued, the meaning of political concepts often pertains to specific experiences of time and expectations for the future. By investigating the temporal dimension of the basic concepts of modern politics (such as state, revolution, representation and class) it is possible to see how they can or can't relate to the temporal dimensions of environmental issues. Although the classic notions of politics seemingly only address society, leaving nature out of the picture, closer scrutiny will reveal their entanglement with environmental issues. Investigating these entanglements might open up vistas to bring the time scale of democratic politics in relation to the time scale of modern politics.
Thomas KAYZEL
Séminaire
English
Weekly 30 to 40 pages of Reading + Class preperation
None
Autumn 2023-2024
1. A presentation (10 %) 2. Mid-term review essay (30 %) 3. Final essay (4000 words, 60 %)
Weekly seminar, including - Introduction by the teacher - Presentation by the students - General discussion of the mandatory reading
- Reinhart Koselleck. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
- Jens Beckert. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
- Locher, Fabien, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Modernity's Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity'. Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (March 2012): 579–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/664552.
- Bruno Latour. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017.
- Timothy Mitchell. Economentality: How the Future Entered Government'. Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (2014): 479–507. https://doi.org/10.1086/676417.
- Katrina Forrester. The Problem of the Future in Postwar Anglo-American Political Philosophy'. Climatic Change 151, no. 1 (2018): 55–66.
- Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Anthropocene Time'. History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018): 5–32. https://doi.org/0.1111/hith.12044.