Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime - Softcover

Latour, Bruno

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509530576 ISBN 13: 9781509530571

Publisher: Polity, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"...Latour's most important contribution to current debates may be his untimely insistence on the importance of thinking universally in a post-universal world."
Los Angeles Review of Books

"Brilliantly mind-bending"
The New York Times

"Concise and wise"
LRB

About the Author:

Bruno Latour is one of the world's leading sociologists and anthropologists. He taught at the Ecole des Mines in Paris from 1982 to 2006 and he is now Professor and Vice-President for Research at Institut d'etudes politiques (Sciences Po). His many books include Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern, Reassembling the Social and Facing Gaia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1509530576
• ISBN 13: 9781509530571
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 140