Planetary Social Thought — Out Now!
Written by Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski
Today — Friday 30 October 2020 — Polity Press publish our book Planetary Social Thought. In dialogue with recent developments in the sciences of the Earth — developments that we argue provide rich ways of conceiving our home planet — we lay out our proposal for a planetary turn in the social sciences. This is the result of many years of thinking and writing together, and a lot of discussion with staff at Polity and our anonymous readers. It’s great to see it out at last, and look forward to seeing how people across and beyond academic disciplines respond to it. See the official promotional ‘blurb’ below.
Over the next weeks and months we’ll explore ideas from the book in various Another Planet blog posts.
Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences
Nigel Clark, Bronislaw Szerszynski
https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509526345
The Anthropocene has emerged as perhaps the scientific concept of the new millennium. Going further than earlier conceptions of the human–environment relationship, Anthropocene science proposes that human activity is tipping the whole Earth system into a new state, with unpredictable consequences. Social life has become a central ingredient in the dynamics of the planet itself.
How should the social sciences respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by this development? In this innovative book, Clark and Szerszynski argue that social thinkers need to revise their own presuppositions about the social: to understand it as the product of a dynamic planet, self-organizing over deep time. They outline ‘planetary social thought’: a transdisciplinary way of thinking social life with and through the Earth. Using a range of case studies, they show how familiar social processes can be radically recast when looked at through a planetary lens, revealing how the world-transforming powers of human social life have always depended on the forging of relations with the inhuman potentialities of our home planet.
Presenting a social theory of the planetary, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in humanity’s relation to the changing Earth.
Table of Contents
Introduction: What Planet Are You On?
Chapter 1: Earth at the Threshold
Chapter 2: Who Speaks through the Earth?
Chapter 3: Planetary Social Life in the Making
Chapter 4: What is Planetary Social Thought?
Chapter 5: Inhuman Modernity, Earthly Violence
Chapter 6: Terra Mobilis
Chapter 7: Unearthing Worlds, Decolonizing the Planet
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Reviews
“We hear a lot about the global environmental crisis, but do we have the ideas to get us out of the problems we have collectively created? Planetary Social Thought challenges social scientists and humanists to rebuild their intellectual house so as to help humanity think anew about a world to come.”
Noel Castree, University of Manchester
“Planetary Social Thought is a wide-ranging exploration of how closely intertwined, and how mutually sensitive, are the human and geological realms. This vivid and passionately argued book can help illuminate these new, emergent landscapes, and chart a path through them.”
Jan Zalasiewicz, University of Leicester
“This book offers a terra-forming analysis, strongly willed to make us think. Using more than one analytic perspective at once — geos and bios and what exceeds both — its scope ranges topologically from the planet to the microbe. Planetary Social Thought is a feat of writing — and it is not afraid of animisms!”
Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis
“Planetary Social Thought takes the challenge of the Anthropocene to a new level. Rather than simply adopting a social science view of the planet, the authors allow planetary forces to redefine the very sense of the social, and allow the planet to take its place in the contested space of social entities. Clark and Szerszynski have redefined what “thought” will be for the twenty-first century.”
Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University
