Troubled pleasures

Reivew of Kate Soper, Post Growth Living
Kate Soper, Post Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (London: Verso, 2020). 240pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78873 887 3 Kate Soper has made some vitally important contributions to ecosocialist and feminist political theory over the last four decades and more. Her interventions around ‘troubled pleasures’, humanism and its discontents, realism/constructionism, and more, have often […]

The inorganic body in the early Marx: A limit-concept of anthropocentrism

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking […]

Romanticism and technology

Romanticism and technology Andrew Bowie Romanticism and technology are often regarded as inherently at odds with each other, one supposedly relying upon a desire to get in touch with a nature in us and outside us which the modern ‘technologized’ world risks losing sight of altogether, the other upon the domination of external nature for […]

The Meaning of Political Ecology

The Meaning of Political Ecology Tim Hayward ‘Political ecology’ is an expression which has become quite familiar in recent years, but does not appear to have acquired a clear and settled meaning. * Evidently it is used to point up some kind of connection between politics, or the political, and ecology, yet the project of […]

Humanism and Nature

Humanism and Nature John O’Neill Those who aim to construct links between Marxism and the green movement often look to Marx’ s early work on alienation as a source for a green Marxism. I There is an immediate apparent problem with any such attempt to marry the early Marx and the greens, viz. that Marx’s […]

Ecology and Human Emancipation

Ecology and Human Emancipation Tim Hayward Humanism vs Prometheanism The entry of ecological considerations into political thought raises new questions about the meaning of human emancipation.* In particular, traditional socialist conceptions of emancipation as a move from a sphere of necessity to one of freedom are rendered radically problematic from an ecological perspective. i As […]

Ethical Dimensions of Human Attitudes to Nature

Ethical Dimensions of Human Attitudes to Nature Radim Bures In this paper I intend to pursue the question as to how ethics can make a contribution to human efforts to protect, or rescue the environment. A complementary question is how the continuing environmental crisis can influence the development of ethical theory itself. Historically speaking, the […]

Women, Humanity and Nature

Women, Humanity and Nature Val Plum wood There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere of nature, has provided one of the main intellectual bases for the domination of women […]

A Critique of Deep Ecology

A Critique of Deep Ecology Richard Sylvan Part I Deep ecology appears to be some elaboration of the position that natural things other than humans have value in themselves, value sometimes perhaps exceeding that of or had by humans. But which elaboration is quite another matter. Indeed deep ecology has not just been rapidly converted […]

Thinking naturally

36* Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995.realism of postmodernism and accept the significance of the ways in which the concept of ʻnatureʼ has been used for ideological purpose. Soperʼs own position occupies that political space. Her strategy is to carve […]

Contingent ontologies: Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler

Contingent ontologies Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler Stella sandford a concerted critique of the sex/gender distinction has not mitigated this sense of historical importance, or even historical necessity. But developments in feminist theory – in particular the claims being made on behalf of various feminisms of difference – and […]

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived Eric matthews * Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2003. xx + 296 pp., £69.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 8101 1445 3 hb., 0 8101 1446 1 pb.; Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of […]