This post is the second of three on the philosophy and politics of the Anthropocene. The first post can be read here .
The ‘new anthropocentrism’ describes the novel state of affairs in the human-Earth relationship. But it does not provide a political theory for responding to the Anthropocene, or its principal element, climate change. The new anthropocentrism may imply that humanity should act as a unified moral agent, accepting collective responsibility for our common fate. Put that way, the geological framing seems to absolve capitalism and the overdeveloped world from responsibility for the onset of the new epoch and provide no guide to action.
Time pressures
Critical social scientists soon objected that by adopting the term ‘Anthropocene’ Earth System scientists appear to be blaming humanity as a whole (anthropos) for shifting the planetary arc when in fact the blame lies with the rich countries responsible for the bulk of emissions and climatic disruption. They coined a plethora of alternative names. Some were just silly (‘Chthulucene’) but ‘Capitalocene’ caught on. I will not rehearse my responses other than to point out that the Soviet Union had a worse record measured by emissions per unit of GDP than the United States, so ‘Industrialocene’ would be more accurate. There is a larger epistemological point to make: since when did social scientists acquire the right to name divisions in the Geological Timescale? In light of the attacks on climate science by denialists, the lack of respect for the science from some social scientists has been dispiriting.
Setting these aside, what we need is a philosophy of history (or perhaps a philosophical anthropology) that thinks in terms of ‘humanity’ when the Anthropocene is viewed as a geological event in deep time and a political philosophy when it is viewed in terms of specific classes, nations, and economic systems in historical time. Only with the latter can we hope to understand and motivate palliative responses (‘every tenth of a degree matters’).
Can one hold both perspectives simultaneously, one a matter of deep time and the other a matter of historical time? Of course one can; it’s a question of when each is salient and how they intersect. However, the radical novelty of the Anthropocene is the displacement of the modern narrative, in which humans entered nature and transformed it, with a narrative in which the Earth System enters human history as an active, destabilising force. The Earth ceases to be the passive stage on which politics unfolds and becomes an actor that increasingly disrupts political conventions and structures.
That sounds straightforward, but it upends most modern political theory. Liberalism, Marxism, nationalism, and even classical realism all presuppose a stable Earth and well-defined territory. But if human history and natural history have merged, politics no longer takes place on the Earth; it takes place inside the Earth System.
One implication that will grow in importance as Earth System processes go awry is that sovereignty becomes climatological. States will increasingly derive legitimacy not simply from protecting borders or prosperity but from mediating between the security of populations and atmospheric and ecological instability. One could imagine future constitutions where ‘maintaining Earth-system resilience’ becomes a primary state function, akin to defence.
For political theory this means that the sovereign is no longer just the elected authority or, in Schmittian terms, ‘he who decides on the exception’ (and there will be plenty of exceptions for latent autocrats to exploit), but whoever can maintain habitability under post-Holocene conditions. In the Holocene, the sovereign defended territory; in the Anthropocene, the sovereign must defend climatic, hydrological, epidemiological and food-system stability, as well as hard borders that may be shifting with sea-level rise. States unable to manage climate disorder will lose legitimacy, eroding their authority.
Returning to the critics’ insistence that the name of the epoch should reflect the blame, it’s worth pointing out that the Earth System scientists were always fully aware of who were to blame. And it is a stretch to claim, as some critics did, that the term gives rise to ‘mystification’ that confuses the public. Who was mystified? Nevertheless, it’s true that identifying the culpable matters politically, both as a way of being clear about where guilt lies but also to know whose behaviour has to change. But here we run into a tricky problem. Those nations primarily to blame for generating the state of affairs may no longer be the ones that can resolve it, where resolving it requires one thing above all others—reducing as quickly as possible annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The arithmetic of blame and responsibility began to change when China became the world’s biggest emitter in 2006. Today, China’s annual emissions now substantially exceed those of the United States, Japan and the European Union combined, and the gap has been widening.
We can deplore the despicable behaviour of Donald Trump (withdrawing from Paris, suppressing clean energy, etc) but the fact is that decisions made in Beijing now have a much greater effect on the future climate than decisions made in Washington. Historical emissions cannot be changed; future ones can. If there were justice in the world, the nations that caused the problem would have to put it right; but even a very rapid reduction in their emissions (which, of course, should be demanded no matter what) will no longer make the decisive difference.
The political subject
In the previous post, I argued that by dissolving human distinctiveness, post-humanism and eco-philosophies disable the political subject capable of taking responsibility for the state of the Earth. My argument should not be read as resurrecting the modern subject, because the Anthropocene has knocked away some of its foundations so that it now sits askew. The seemingly unthinkable merging of human history and Earth history (the profound insight of Dipesh Chakrabarty in his 2009 paper, now cited 6453 times) destroys the conceptual architecture within which the modern subject understood itself. The free, reflexive being making its own future by taking control of its environment perhaps reaches an apogee in plans to seize total control of the Earth System using solar geoengineering. (I reviewed the science and politics of solar geoengineering in my 2015 book Earthmasters and they do not appear to have changed much since then.) The self-determining Enlightenment subject premised its freedom on discarding superstition and mastering nature; but in mastering nature we have created a nature increasingly unpredictable and uncontrollable, the angry beast. As I noted, humans reached peak power over Earth at the moment the Earth became unmanageable.
All of this suggests an attack on modernity as such (‘modernity’ as in We Have Never Been Modern). Liberal freedom emerged, and could only emerge, in the unusually benign conditions provided by the Holocene, when humans could assume a more forgiving planetary background compared to the violent upheavals of the pre-Holocene, one conducive to the emergence of civilisation. In this reading, the Anthropocene reveals freedom itself as geophysically conditional. This goes beyond the obvious claim that climate change constrains choices; the very experience of modern autonomy—mobility, abundance, endless growth, the sense that the future is open—appears more and more as an artefact of Holocene stability. Rather than the pinnacle of human liberation, the Anthropocene exposes ‘the individual’, the hero of liberal modernity, as a stage of selfhood enabled by the Holocene, a temporary product of regular seasons, cheap energy, expanding markets, and limits not yet breached.
Seen this way, climate politics is not simply a dispute about emissions or energy systems; it is a crisis of the Enlightenment self. Moreover, if modern individuality depended on fossil-fuelled abundance and climatic constancy then political backlash movements may express a subconscious defence of a disappearing mode of subjectivity, in addition to economic grievance and cultural fractures.
To take this a step further, if the subject of Enlightenment modernity is subverted by the Anthropocene, so is the subject of liberal politics, that is, the autonomous, rights-bearing individual choosing their future. The Anthropocene is not just an ecological rupture but an assault on political philosophy.
Tragedy and politics
The Holocene is now in the rearview mirror, and the Anthropocene future is not looking pretty for humans (and a multitude of other creatures). Western philosophy and its ethical traditions are almost entirely structured around reversibility—wrongs can be righted, debts repaid, conditions restored. (Tim Mulgan’s Ethics for a Broken World gestures towards this.) Tragedy in the Greek sense involves a logic of completion and catharsis. Hidden truths are revealed, moral conflicts are clarified, and disorder is symbolically resolved, even in a story as tragic as Oedipus. Classical tragedy, in which perpetrators are human, gives suffering form, dignity and recognition. The Anthropocene may deny even that. A devastating flood event produces catastrophe without catharsis. On the other hand, protecting society from the flood event is a human decision. Decisions about who will be protected and who will be sacrificed are likely to become the central political drama of the Anthropocene. Already walls are being built.
Staying with tragedy, after the Enlightenment modern political philosophies mostly assumed that history bends toward emancipation, rationality, or progress. (Exceptions include Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke and Carl Schmitt.) Earth-system destabilisation revives the ancient (tragic) insight that humans can create forces they then cannot master and cannot reverse. (The rising panic of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice provides a handy analogy.) This is not mere pessimism but a philosophical claim about temporality and agency. In tragedy, actions accumulate consequences that escape intention and exceed moral accounting—almost a definition of climate change.
Democratic politics may struggle because democracies are structurally anti-tragic. Electoral systems reward growth, optimism, reversibility, and managerial reassurance. Yet Anthropocene politics increasingly concerns irreversible losses, locked-in harms, and poor decisions made under pressure. (Think responses to extreme weather events and failure to build resilience.) This may explain why climate discourse oscillates strangely between apocalyptic panic and upbeat managerialism, with little room for mature tragic language.
I have not thought through this problem of irreversibility and tragedy, but it seems to bear heavily on how we can act responsibly, how we find meaning, and how the future structures our consciousness. Someone should go there.