Nature, Action and the Future Political Thought and the Environment

About this book

Climate change is one of the great challenges of modern politics. In Nature, Action and the Future, leading political theorists and historians investigate how the history of political ideas can help us make sense of it. The contributors add a historical perspective to contemporary debates in political theory. They also show that the history of political thought offers new directions for thinking about the environment today. By situating the relationship between humans and nature within a wider history of ideas, the essays provide alternative ways of thinking about the most intractable problems of environmental politics – the status of science in modern democracies, problems of collective action, and the challenges of fatalism. Nature, Action and the Future will create new avenues of research for scholars and students in the history of political thought. It is essential reading for undergraduate students interested in environmental challenges: both those in politics seeking a historical perspective, and those in history who want to link their studies to the present.

Contents

1. Introduction: history, theory and the environment / Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith

Part I. Time Nature and the Land
2. Is there any place for environmental thinking in early modern European political thought? / Annabel Brett
3. 'Sustainability', resources and the destiny of states in German cameralist thought / Paul Warde
4. Abundance and scarcity in geological time, 1784–1844 / Fredrick Albritton Jonsson
5. Slack / Malcolm Bull

Part II. Science, Agency and the Future
6. The nature of fear and the fear of nature from Hobbes to the hydrogen bomb / Deborah Coen
7. Between Frankfurt and Vienna: two traditions of political ecology / John O'Neill and Thomas Uebel
8. Uncertainty, action and politics: the problem of negligibility / Melissa Lane
9. What kind of problem is negligibility: a response to Melissa Lane / Richard Tuck
10. Optimism, pessimism, fatalism / David Runciman

Afterword: climate change in the light of the past / Quentin Skinner

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Biography

Katrina Forrester is assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Sophie Smith is associate professor of political theory at the University of Oxford.


Contributors:
- Katrina Forrester
- Sophie Smith
- Annabel Brett
- Paul Warde
- Fredrick Albritton Jonsson
- Malcolm Bull
- Deborah Coen
- John O'Neill
- Thomas Uebel
- Melissa Lane
- Richard Tuck
- David Runciman
- Quentin Skinner