by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright
Verso Books
1/7/2020, paperback
SKU: 9781786634450
How climate change will affect our political theory--for better and worse
Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading?
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 provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue 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.
Reviews:
"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
"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." -- Will Myers, International Socialist Review
"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 How to Blow Up a Pipeline, White Skin Black Fuel, and Fossil Capital
About the Authors:
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.