Cover of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
by Dipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Cloth: 978-0-226-10050-0 | Paper: 978-0-226-73286-2 | Electronic: 978-0-226-73305-0
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.

Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history.

REVIEWS

“With his new masterwork, Chakrabarty confirms that he is one of the most creative and philosophically-minded historians writing today. The oppositions he proposes between the global of globalization and the global of global warming, between the world and the planet, between sustainability and habitability are illuminating and effective for thinking and acting through our highly uncertain and disoriented times.”
— François Hartog, author of 'Chronos'

“One of the first thinkers to reckon with the concept of the Anthropocene and its relation to humanism and its critics, Chakrabarty forges new territory in his account of the planetary. If globalism was an era of human and market interconnection, the planetary marks the intrusion of geological forces, transforming both the concept of ‘the human’ and its accompanying sense of agency. This is a tour de force of critical thinking that will prove to be a game changer for the humanities.”
— Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

"Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty confronts the ‘planeticide’ by calling for a humanistic and critical approach to the Anthropocene. . . . Ever alert to the holistic and far reaching vision upheld by ‘deep history,’ the Chicago professor re-raises the old question of the human condition in the new framework of the geobiological history of the planet."
— Arquitectura Viva

"The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, by Dipesh Chakrabarty, is in my judgment the most compelling and encompassing book by a humanist on the complexities and asymmetries of the Anthropocene to date."
— The Contemporary Condition

“For Chakrabarty, ‘global’ does not refer to the entirety of the world, but rather to a particular mode of thought. . . . In critiquing the global, Chakrabarty offers another mode of thinking that can perhaps provide the philosophical grounding for a truly ecological approach. He terms it the ‘planetary.’ Chakrabarty argues the ‘planetary’ is not a unified totality, but rather ‘a dynamic ensemble of relationships.’ While the global mode of thought retains the centrality of the human observer, the planetary mode of thought decentres the human and its apprehension of the world. The human becomes only one node within a much more complex and multivalent system of actors, both human and non-human.”
— Christopher McAteer, Green European Journal

"In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, University of Chicago historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an expansive, but hardly exhaustive, overview of the Anthropocene, focusing on how historians, in particular, have grappled with the conditions of a world under physical duress. As humans have become a 'geological force' in this new epoch and the earth has itself become an archive, with human behavior imprinted in the fossil record and ice caps, we are at the cusp of a new understanding of the agency of humankind and other terrestrial beings. This 'planetary' understanding can, in turn, offer a new ethical paradigm for inhabiting this afflicted present, and can apply to remote pasts and possible futures. Such, at least, is the hope expressed in Chakrabarty’s book."
— The Hedgehog Review

"Immensely clarifying and illuminating. . . . while Chakrabarty frequently invokes research produced by natural scientists, his argument carves out an important space for humanists in interpreting and responding to the consequences of anthropogenic geological agency."
— Isis Journal

"This book provides a thought-provoking, complex discussion of how climate change challenges the humanities, history, and the human sense of time but presupposes a command of intellectual history. . . . Overall, Chakrabarty outlines the overlapping of different histories once thought to be distinct. The planet itself, he argues, is a 'humanist category.'"
— Choice

"Environmental humanists... tend to treat 'globe' and 'planet' as synonyms; Chakrabarty shows the critical and generative importance of the distinction. Evoking geological time is de rigueur; he shows what it means to dwell with that time without displacing it onto world historical time. Rapturous treatments of multispecies agency abound; he challenges the latent anthropocentrism and even paternalism of some new materialisms."
— American Literary History

"The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is a breathtaking book. Chakrabarty challenges us to reimagine the human from a planetary perspective, a deep history—an infinite horizon of human history—in order to come to terms with the climate crisis that human actions have precipitated."
— The Book Review India

"Chakrabarty’s approach to the Anthropocene is a rich collage of intellectual influences primarily from India, Europe, Australia and North America. The book is an exemplary illustration that the magnitude and scope of the Anthropocene is not only challenging. For many academics, it is an inviting opportunity to take stock of one’s lessons learnt through research and personal experience. At this stage of the academic debate, the Anthropocene offers plenty of room for thematic manoeuvres. Chakrabarty displays a version of such intellectual playfulness in an overall sense-making attempt."
— British Journal for the History of Science

"It's no overstatement to think of this book as having clanged the bell for a new normal in the humanities and social sciences when it comes to telling the story of ourselves, that is, when it comes to human history. Responsible history should today be geological even when recounting the human record. Chakrabarty raised a series of open-ended, difficult questions about a range of core concerns in the humanities and social sciences from how we can understand ourselves and society to how we ought to think about political economy and morality."
— Environmental Philosophy

"Our academic engagements with law and development and social sciences more broadly must attempt to make sense of the rifts between the global and the planetary, even if such endeavours transcend and disrupt disciplinary confines and assumptions... The objective should be to displace the ideological supremacy of human species, Euroamerican and universalistic cosmologies, and simultaneously further the plurality of human-nonhuman relations, minority thought and just political action. Chakrabarty's book is one essential step in this direction."
— Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law

"In contrast to most of the interventions that we can read about the ecological catastrophe, Chakrabarty does not rush to give us solutions, but rather seeks to sharpen the problem... By locating this difficulty at the intersection of the two great critical events of our history, decolonization on the one hand and global warming on the other, and by identifying the problematic node from these two distinct figures of totalization that are globalization and planetarization, Chakrabarty inscribes himself in an original way in a body of contemporary research in which the legacy of the critique of colonization and ecological awareness are mixed... Chakrabarty is an Aufklärer, and in this book as in the previous one, a single question is at work: how to inherit the Enlightenment? How to prolong the cosmopolitical project?"
— Critique

"Chakrabarty’s argument about what postcolonial studies has to offer the environmental humanities goes well beyond the established appeals to inequality that constitute climate justice discourse . . . As such, this book comes highly recommended for anyone working in the environmental humanities."
— Ecozon@

"The new book by Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, is to my mind currently the best available introduction to the new challenges for political thinking in the Anthropocene."
— Postcolonial Studies

"The challenge of Anthropocene research is not that it compels determining which view is the singly correct one; the challenge is that almost all views (if not all of them) are to some extent correct. How, then, do we go about addressing these multiple (potentially and partially correct) views? Open the pages of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and see for yourself."
— History and Theory

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0001
[Anthropocene;climate change;history;natural history;capitalism;humanity;human species;modernity;globalization]
The current planetary crisis of climate change challenges longstanding Western conceptions of human history.Globalization theories, Marxist accounts of political economics and culture, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism can yield only partial accounts of the crisis’ origins and implications.Anthropogenic climate change, and the concept of the Anthropocene, undermine the longstanding humanist distinction between human history and natural history.Human geophysical agency likewise qualifies traditional humanist histories of modernity and globalization. The Anthropocene requires global histories of capital to be written alongside the species history of humanity. Such emerging conceptual relationships push at the accustomed limits of our historical understanding, and point toward a provisional, internally diverse history – a negative universal history – of the human species that may emerge from the Anthropocene.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0002
[climate change;history;timescales;risk;statistics;cost-benefit analysis;tipping point;species;anthropocentrism]
The evidence for climate change reaches far into the past, and the effects of climate change will stretch tens of thousands of years into the future. Human lives and human politics, however, unfurl over mere decades. This disparity of timescales is only one of several intellectual tensions and faultlines that the climate change crisis reveals. The statistical probabilities and cost-benefit analyses that domesticate the risks of modern life are ill-suited to describe climate change’s tipping points, instabilities, irreversibility, and threat of widespread species extinction. In light of the Anthropocene, our inevitably anthropocentric thinking should broaden to include the awareness of the planet of which we are a part, and histories of our disparate human lives must be supplemented with the story of our collective human life as a species.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0003
[globe;planet;Earth system;Earth System Science;Martin Heidegger;Hannah Arendt;Carl Schmitt;sustainability;habitability]
A reading of Heidegger, Arendt, and Schmitt alongside the writings of Earth System scientists points toward a distinction between the concepts of the globe and the planet.Though our concept of the planet emerged from the technological, scientific, and philosophical developments associated with globalization –and particularly from postwar Earth System Science – the planet is nonetheless different from the globe.As the setting for human action since the beginnings of European overseas expansion and the development of capitalism, the globe is an anthropocentric concept unlike the planet of biogeophysical processes that humans now shape. Earth System Science draws on physics, geology, chemistry, biology, and applied mathematics to understand the complex processes that have shaped the planet’s development. This interdisciplinary science observes the Earth as if from outside, and as one planet among many.Sustainability is a concept of the human globe: it describes a human use of nature that does not spoil its potential for future use.Earth System Science’s concept of habitability, in contrast, does not place human action at its center, and thereby reflects a planetary perspective.In our thinking about our environment, time, and politics, we live at the cusp of the global and the planetary.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0004
[Anthropocene;climate change;modernity;modernization;development;distributive justice;Third World;thin description;political thought;Jawaharlal Nehru]
Though debate around climate change is related to questions of global distributive justice raised by critics of capitalism and environmental colonialism, the significance of the Anthropocene is not simply reducible to these. The widespread desire for air conditioning in developing countries is emblematic of the challenges faced by attempts to control climate change while still respecting the everyday aspirations of the poor for the benefits that modern life brings.Anticolonial third-world modernizers like Nehru, Nasser, and Senghor sought energy-intensive development through irrigation, electrification, and transportation, giving modernity’s global project a second, original life. The conceptual and ontological separation of the human from the nonhuman accords with the “thin descriptions” and the simplifying, often mathematical, models that structure and direct modern efforts to direct, control, or exploit the natural world.These models and efforts depend on purifyingwhat is found in nature before it can be used. Attempts to augment our accustomed forms of politics –and half a millennium of Western political thought – in light of the Anthropocene will require a deep rethinking of these tendencies.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0005
[Rohith Vemula;Dalit;caste;Carl Sagan;Martha Nussbaum;body;humanity;Frantz Fanon]
The writings of the Dalit student activist Rohith Vemula, read alongside those of Martha Nussbaum and Carl Sagan, point to the long-term history of humanity and the connections between human history and planetary systems. The “Dalit body” is marginalized because of its forced contact with death and waste matter; it exemplifies the human body’s connections to the nonliving and the nonhuman. Studies of caste in the 1960s and 70s emphasized social mobility and saw in the Bhakti movement a ground for nascent democratic egalitarianism. The Subaltern Studies movement sublimated caste into the categories of “peasant” and “class.”Yet despite the idealistic rejection of untouchability among individual Indians and the liberal politics of modernizing nationalism, the Dalit body produces anxiety today.Like Fanon’s “black body,” the Dalit body is central to a structure of oppression. Nevertheless, its conceptual involvement with animals and microbes points to the fragility of the division between human and nonhuman that characterizes Western political thinking.The Anthropocene encourages a planetary understanding of humans within the web of life, but our politics remain focused on individual humans – not yet on humans as a totality, as one species among many in the long history of the planet’s life.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0006
[animal life;moral life;Immanuel Kant;Genesis;Pope Francis;Amartya Sen;Bruno Latour;microbes;anthropocentrism;great acceleration]
One conception of the climate change problem is relatively uncomplicated: as a problem of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.But climate change is only one among many planetary-scale problems that humanity has caused and faces.Humans rose to their position of evolutionary dominance quite quickly, and, through a "great acceleration" of human population and planetary influence, have outstripped their evolutionary niche in the biosphere.Kant’s analytical retelling of Genesis established a separation between humans’ biological or “animal” life and their ethical-political “moral” life. But our collective biological life now strains the planet’s capacity and threatens other species.The assumption that the planet will take care of our animal life of eating, sleeping, and reproducing while we search for a just collective moral life is therefore under strain.Though such varied thinkers as Pope Francis and Amartya Sen suggest that humans assume stewardship for other species, such stewardship is difficult to imagine in light of our limited knowledge of other species, particularly given microbes’ prominent role in the biosphere.Bruno Latour’s discussion of microbes in The Pasteurization of France underscores the modern Western tendency to anthropocentrism, and underscores the need to think beyond it.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0007
[Anthropocene;anthropocentrism;humanity;force;power;timescales]
The Anthropocene requires us to consider both human and geological timescales, and to view human history alongside the history of the planet.However, the planetary perspective often recedes from view, and the term “Anthropocene” typically stands for a human-centered appraisal of humanity’s newfound geophysical power.Some humanists and social scientists see the Anthropocene as a misnomer whose unified anthropos is a stalking horse for environmental neocolonialism or a conceptual veil cast overcapitalism’s inequities and iniquities.The vast timescales of the Anthropocene, other critics fear, may paralyze political discussion and lead to a technocratic scientific government.Such Anthropocene debates –like the climate change policy discussions they aim to transform –emphasize events and actions on human timescales; the hundred-million-year perspective of geophysics lies out of the frame.Similarly, these debates turn away from scientific discussion of humanity’s geophysical force, and emphasize instead anthropocentric and inevitably value-laden claims about humanity’s power.Yet the Anthropocene is at once a human story about humans and their politics, measured in years amenable to human reckoning, and a geophysical story in which humanity plays only a small role.Our planetary awareness now requires us to rethink these intertwined stories.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0008
[humanity;nature;planet;Immanuel Kant;Rabindranath Tagore;mutuality;wonder;reverence]
How are individual humans to face the planetary aspects of their own lives?A mutual, reciprocal relationship between humanity and nature has featured in the major axial religions, in Kant, and in the interwar writings of such philosophers as Jaspers, Heidegger, and Freud.Tagore interpreted the early evolutionary history of humanity to describe humanity’s special uniqueness, its place at the center of things, and its capacity to view the world as a whole. These characteristics structured the mutual relationship that post-Enlightenment thinkers and writers observed between humans and the world around them.In their experience of nature, thinkers like Kierkegaard felt a profound sense of their own specialness and a wonder at their intimate mutual relationship with nature.The aesthetic experience of such mutuality depends on the singular individual’s repeated encounters with a nature stable enough over the span of a single human life to become familiar over time.But a changing Earth disrupts this stability. As the planetary intrudes on our everyday lives, as geological time intrudes on human time, a new tradition of political thought may aim to incorporate the fear-tinged wonder – the reverence – for nature that Enlightenment modernity stripped away.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226733050.003.0009
[Bruno Latour;Dipesh Chakrabarty;humanity;Anthropocene;globe;planet;individualism;modernity;reverence;politics]
Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty discuss the concepts and themes of the book: the growth of awareness of the Anthropocene, the emergence of the concepts of the globe and the planet, modernity and individualism, global politics and the possibility of planetary politics, and the respect tinged with fear that underpins reverence for the natural world.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2021. Page maintained by BiblioVault.