Search results for ""Author Bruno Latour""

The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

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Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.

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The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

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In this book, Bruno Latour pursues his ethnographic inquiries into the different value systems of modern societies. After science, technology, religion, art, it is now law that is being studied by using the same comparative ethnographic methods. The case study is the daily practice of the French supreme courts, the Conseil d’Etat, specialized in administrative law (the equivalent of the Law Lords in Great Britain). Even though the French legal system is vastly different from the Anglo-American tradition and was created by Napoleon Bonaparte at the same time as the Code-based system, this branch of French law is the result of a home-grown tradition constructed on precedents. Thus, even though highly technical, the cases that form the matter of this book, are not so exotic for an English-speaking audience. What makes this study an important contribution to the social studies of law is that, because of an unprecedented access to the collective discussions of judges, Latour has been able to reconstruct in detail the weaving of legal reasoning: it is clearly not the social that explains the law, but the legal ties that alter what it is to be associated together. It is thus a major contribution to Latour’s social theory since it is now possible to compare the ways legal ties build up associations with the other types of connection that he has studied in other fields of activity. His project of an alternative interpretation of the very notion of society has never been made clearer than in this work. To reuse the title of his first book, this book is in effect the 'Laboratory Life of Law'.

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Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, sociologists and historians of science. In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context and technical content are both essential to a proper understanding of scientific activity. Emphasizing that science can only be understood through its practice, the author examines science and technology in action: the role of scientific literature, the activities of laboratories, the institutional context of science in the modern world, and the means by which inventions and discoveries become accepted. From the study of scientific practice he develops an analysis of science as the building of networks. Throughout, Bruno Latour shows how a lively and realistic picture of science in action alters our conception of not only the natural sciences but also the social sciences and the sociology of knowledge in general.This stimulating book, drawing on a wealth of examples from a wide range of scientific activities, will interest all philosophers, sociologists and historians of science, scientists and engineers, and students of the philosophy of social science and the sociology of knowledge.

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BBruno Latour, filósofo, antropólogo, politólogo y sociólogo de la ciencia, ha impartido clases en la London School of Economics y en el Departamento de Historia de la Ciencia de la Universidad de Harvard, y es profesor emérito de la École de Sciences-Po de París. Entre sus obras más destacadas están Nunca fuimos modernos (1993) y Cara a cara con el planeta (2015). Es sin duda uno de los pensadores franceses con mayor prestigio internacional.La crítica ha dicho...Fascinante. Latour es uno de los pensadores más interesantes de la escena intelectual mundial. Sabe cómo llamar nuestra atención sobre la complejidad de los problemas, manteniendo una claridad expositiva fuera de lo común.La StampaLa elección de Donald Trump ha sacado de sus casillas a Bruno Latour. Y cuando este imperturbable filósofo y antropólogo, de temperamento alegre, se sale de sus casillas, se dirige al poder maligno en un estilo deliberadamente abrupto, pero también elabora los medi

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On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naive belief,” the suggestion that fetishes—objects invested with mythical powers—are fabricated and that facts are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of “iconoclash,” making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons.

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The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman. The occasion for the debate was the impending publication of Harman's book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. During the discussion, Latour (the 'Prince') compared the professional philosophers who have pursued him over the years to a pack of wolves. The Prince and the Wolf is the story of what happens when the wolf catches up with the prince. Latour and Harman engage in brisk and witty conversation about questions that go to the heart of both metaphysics and research methodology: What are objects? How do they interact? And best how to study them?

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In a series of televised interviews broadcast in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings, and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time was also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

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After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to ‘the world as it was before the pandemic’. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis – that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we – inhabitants of the earth – live, what kind of place ‘earth’ is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible – a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.

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The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name 'Gaia' for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on 'natural religion,' Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime.

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With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present.Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

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In a series of televised interviews broadcast in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings, and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time was also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

Read more less

The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name 'Gaia' for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on 'natural religion,' Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime.

Read more less

In this book Bruno Latour calls upon Christians to join the struggle to avert a climate catastrophe. First and foremost, Christians need to overcome their lack of interest in “earthly things” and pay attention to the Earth at a time when it is being neglected. He also urges Christians to renew their understanding of their faith in the context of the new image of the world that has emerged from earth system science – that of a world in which the myriad of beings that inhabit the world are interdependent and living in close proximity on a slender, fragile membrane on the surface of the planet. This new image of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the sciences, on politics, and on religion, just as, in earlier centuries, the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo upset the old order. Latour sees the ecological crisis, and the cosmological mutation that it entails, as an opportunity to convey anew, to the largest possible audience, the tradition of Christianity as it has never been appreciated before, by bringing to bear the lessons of eschatology on the great crisis that looms before us all.

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Bruno Latour’s long term project is to compare the felicity and infelicity conditions of the different values dearest to the heart of those who have ‘never been modern’. According to him, this is the only way to develop an anthropology of the Moderns. After his work on science, on technology and, more recently, on law, this book explores the truth conditions of religious speech acts. Even though there is no question that religion is one of the values that has been intensely cherished in the course of history, it’s also clear that it has become immensely difficult to tune in to its highly specific mode of enunciation. Every effort to speak in the right key sounds awkward, reactionary, pious or simply empty. Hence the necessity of devising a way of writing that brings to the fore this elusive form of speech to render it audible again. In this highly original book, the author offers a completely different tack on the endless ‘science and religion’ conflict by protecting them both from the confusion with the notion of information. Like The Making of Law, this book is one more attempt at developing this ‘inquiry on modes of existence’ that provides an alternative definition of society.

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Bruno Latour’s long term project is to compare the felicity and infelicity conditions of the different values dearest to the heart of those who have ‘never been modern’. According to him, this is the only way to develop an anthropology of the Moderns. After his work on science, on technology and, more recently, on law, this book explores the truth conditions of religious speech acts. Even though there is no question that religion is one of the values that has been intensely cherished in the course of history, it’s also clear that it has become immensely difficult to tune in to its highly specific mode of enunciation. Every effort to speak in the right key sounds awkward, reactionary, pious or simply empty. Hence the necessity of devising a way of writing that brings to the fore this elusive form of speech to render it audible again. In this highly original book, the author offers a completely different tack on the endless ‘science and religion’ conflict by protecting them both from the confusion with the notion of information. Like The Making of Law, this book is one more attempt at developing this ‘inquiry on modes of existence’ that provides an alternative definition of society.

Read more less

How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay offer a lively introduction to the work of that forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde's solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp 'passionate interests'. In Tarde's view, capitalism is not a system of cold calculations - rather it is a constant amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde's work defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable. At a time when the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated debate, Latour and Lepinay provide a valuable historical perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism.

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After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to ‘the world as it was before the pandemic’. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis – that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we – inhabitants of the earth – live, what kind of place ‘earth’ is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible – a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.

Read more less

In this book Bruno Latour calls upon Christians to join the struggle to avert a climate catastrophe. First and foremost, Christians need to overcome their lack of interest in “earthly things” and pay attention to the Earth at a time when it is being neglected. He also urges Christians to renew their understanding of their faith in the context of the new image of the world that has emerged from earth system science – that of a world in which the myriad of beings that inhabit the world are interdependent and living in close proximity on a slender, fragile membrane on the surface of the planet. This new image of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the sciences, on politics, and on religion, just as, in earlier centuries, the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo upset the old order. Latour sees the ecological crisis, and the cosmological mutation that it entails, as an opportunity to convey anew, to the largest possible audience, the tradition of Christianity as it has never been appreciated before, by bringing to bear the lessons of eschatology on the great crisis that looms before us all.

Read more less

What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Louis Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteur’s success depended upon a whole network of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime example of science in action.Latour argues that the triumph of the biologist and his methodology must be understood within the particular historical convergence of competing social forces and conflicting interests. Yet Pasteur was not the only scientist working on the relationships of microbes and disease. How was he able to galvanize the other forces to support his own research? Latour shows Pasteur’s efforts to win over the French public—the farmers, industrialists, politicians, and much of the scientific establishment.Instead of reducing science to a given social environment, Latour tries to show the simultaneous building of a society and its scientific facts. The first section of the book, which retells the story of Pasteur, is a vivid description of an approach to science whose theoretical implications go far beyond a particular case study. In the second part of the book, “Irreductions,” Latour sets out his notion of the dynamics of conflict and interaction, of the “relation of forces.” Latour’s method of analysis cuts across and through the boundaries of the established disciplines of sociology, history, and the philosophy of science, to reveal how it is possible not to make the distinction between reason and force. Instead of leading to sociological reductionism, this method leads to an unexpected irreductionism.

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This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.

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Under what conditions could ecology, instead of being one cluster of movements among others, organise politics around an agenda and a set of beliefs? Can ecology aspire to define the political horizon in the way that liberalism, socialism, conservatism and other political ideologies have done at various times and places? What can ecology learn from history about how new political movements emerge, and how they win the struggle for ideas long before they translate their ideas into parties and elections? In this short text, consisting of seventy-six talking points, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz argue that if the ecological movement is to gain ideological consistency and autonomy it must offer a political narrative that recognises, embraces and effectively represents its project in terms of social conflict. Political ecology must accept that it brings along division. It must provide a convincing cartography of the conflicts it generates and, based on this, it must try to define a common horizon of collective action. In order to represent and describe these conflicts, Latour and Schultz propose to reuse the old notions of ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’, albeit infused with a new meaning in line with the ecological concerns of our New Climate Regime. Advancing the idea of a new ecological class, assembled by its collective interests in fighting the logic of production and safeguarding our planet’s conditions of habitability, they ask: how can a proud and self-aware ecological class emerge and take effective action to shape our collective future?

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Under what conditions could ecology, instead of being one cluster of movements among others, organise politics around an agenda and a set of beliefs? Can ecology aspire to define the political horizon in the way that liberalism, socialism, conservatism and other political ideologies have done at various times and places? What can ecology learn from history about how new political movements emerge, and how they win the struggle for ideas long before they translate their ideas into parties and elections? In this short text, consisting of seventy-six talking points, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz argue that if the ecological movement is to gain ideological consistency and autonomy it must offer a political narrative that recognises, embraces and effectively represents its project in terms of social conflict. Political ecology must accept that it brings along division. It must provide a convincing cartography of the conflicts it generates and, based on this, it must try to define a common horizon of collective action. In order to represent and describe these conflicts, Latour and Schultz propose to reuse the old notions of ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’, albeit infused with a new meaning in line with the ecological concerns of our New Climate Regime. Advancing the idea of a new ecological class, assembled by its collective interests in fighting the logic of production and safeguarding our planet’s conditions of habitability, they ask: how can a proud and self-aware ecological class emerge and take effective action to shape our collective future?

Read more less