Hobbes in the Anthropocene: Reconsidering the State of Nature in Its Relevance for Governing

Abstract

The theoretical work of Thomas Hobbes marks the dawn of political modernity and thus also the beginning of modern reasoning about governing. In his Leviathan, Hobbes creates the modern space of the political through the exclusion of the world’s social and natural abundance. This crossroads of political thinking might not least be of relevance for the Anthropocene. After all, affirming the Anthropocene returns mankind to a cosmos of infinite human–nature interrelationships, which strongly resembles Hobbes’s conceptual depiction of the premodern state of nature and its incomprehensible, contingent, and precarious world, a world that Hobbes had intended to ban for good. In this context, this article reconsiders the state of nature’s internal dynamics in its relevance for governing in the Anthropocene—at the expense of the normative claims of modernist governing. After all, embracing the complex ontologies of the Anthropocene and the state of nature disperses agency among the human and nonhuman world, which questions the idea of ethical and political accountability. Without such a reference, governing runs the risk of becoming arbitrary and thereby another shallow projection of modernist conceptions. This article develops an interpretation of political subjectivity as a reference for governing, deriving from the materialistic world of the Hobbesian state of nature. On this foundation, the article elaborates on how this reading of subjectivity reconfigures the conception of political space and how this shift affects the scope of governing.

Accountability in the Anthropocene: Activating responsible agents of reform or futile finger‐pointing?

“…Yet this ‘conventional liberal grammar of responsibility’ (Eckersley, 2016, p. 1) rests on assumptions that human agents have the requisite foresight, knowledge and capacity to responsibly exercise their agency (Eckersley, 2017, p. 984). And these assumptions are seriously destabilised by prevailing conditions in the Anthropocene, in which agency is dispersed widely amongst the human and nonhuman world, intense inequalities and asymmetrical power relations persist (Gooch et al, 2019), and ‘devious chains of cause and effect’ (Bebbington et al 2020, p. 161) make causal knowledge and attribution regarding environmental damages ever more difficult (Bodin et al, 2019; Burke & Fishel, 2019; Jamieson & Di Paola, 2016; Lakitsch, 2021; Pattberg & Zelli, 2016).…”

Multivocal Critical Qualitative Inquiry as an Avenue for Public Policy

“…Calling for a political activation of relationality proposed by Escobar (2018a), I assume that MCQI can make-with in a variety of complex ways to integrate not just the multiplicity of human experiences but also other life forms. As Lakitsch (2021) discusses, striving to foster a construction of political subjectivity in relation to the human and also along with the nonhuman, is to "participate in processes of becoming with (sympoiesis) others in the 'multispecies muddle . .…”

A Hobbesian Argument for World Government

“…The interesting thing is that people adhering to different theoretical perspectives use Hobbes in a variety of ways. He has been used for fundamentally different purposes, such as understanding the dynamics of war and arguing in favour of diversity and tolerance [16]. Others use Hobbes' philosophy when arguing for cosmopolitanism [17], and while most see him as a progenitor of realism [18], others see him as a neoliberal constructivist [19].…”