Foreword
Dipesh Chakrabarty

A great transformation - to use Karl Polanyi's famous expression in his 1944 book of the same name - is under way in the world today. Its magnitude is such that dealing with it calls for profound and difficult shifts in our ideas about economy and polity. The planet-wide environmental crisis that goes by the name of 'climate change' or 'global warming' calls into question the long-held assumption that the pursuit of human freedoms or autonomy - so central to the idea of politics - was inseparably connected to the pursuit of abundance or affluence. 'Climate change', writes Pierre Charbonnier, the author of this ambitious and brilliant book, 'is exploding one by one all the strata of modern political reflexivity' (p. 237). Charbonnier follows in Polanyi's footsteps in seeking to understand and historicize this transformation in order to articulate the demands it makes on our imaginations of the future. Yet his task is rendered far more difficult than Polanyi's by a difference between the contexts in which they undertake their respective projects. The transformation analysed by Polanyi - the rise of the market economy - had come to maturation in the nineteenth century, a good forty years before he began to work on the topic. He could truly be the historian of the 'great transformation' he wanted to study, for that transformation itself was in the past. Charbonnier, however, is living through the very transition he seeks to historicize. The phrase 'histories of the present' is popular in academic circles, but it signifies an intellectually hazardous enterprise. For the present, as Indian grammarians often remarked in the past, only half reveals itself. You see through it but darkly. How do you describe, analyse, get an intellectual grip on something that is swirling around you? How do you arrest and study the waves you are swimming in? How do you create the intellectual distance that you need for your analysis to have a modicum of objectivity?

Charbonnier rises to this challenge, first, by leveraging his sense of a looming crisis to political relationship not only to the present but, more significantly, to the received ideas of the political. Hence his statement:

Climate change is the name of the historic present because it is both a fact, established by geosciences, a heritage to bear, whether we like it or not, and an ordeal to be overcome - in other words, a political condition. And if this ordeal is so difficult to face up to, it is because the current deterioration of planetary ecological conditions is more than just the result of an error committed in the past and needing to be corrected later, or a figure of evil of which we have become aware in retrospect. (p. 241)

Even the standard critiques from the left that assign culpability to the 'capitalist mode of production' or 'technoscientific objectification of the world' appear insufficient. They are relevant for their critiques of exploitation of humans by humans. But their 'productivist' language keeps them committed to the affluence/autonomy duality, with the consequence that the subject of resistance they envisage remains imprisoned within a construction of 'the social' that maintains 'the exteriority of nature'. Within this framework, 'the nonhuman environment' is regarded as a 'stock of available resources' on the basis of which one can 'draw the conditions of emancipation' (p. 238). It leaves unquestioned, says Charbonnier, the 'two totally heterogeneous' spheres that imaginaries of the 'modern' assume: the 'officially recognized . [territory] promoted as the space for the political and legal emancipation of the individual', and an 'unofficial' sphere consisting of 'the geo-ecological space necessary for the material maintenance of subsistence', generally accessed by 'extra-legal means (nebulous commercial contracts, colonization)' (pp. 228-9).

The maintenance of this separation is what has ironically led to the historical conditions Charbonnier finds himself in when he introduces his book to the reader. One the one hand, there is the world described and celebrated, famously, by the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, a world where 'poverty, illness and ignorance' are being reduced, where the overall median income almost doubled between 2003 and 2013, and figures relating to life expectancy, literacy, nutrition and the number of children surviving beyond childhood are on the rise (p. 5). The growing size of the human population, one could add, also points to human flourishing. In 1900 humans numbered around 1.6 billion. Today there are nearly 8 billion of us. There is no question that, speaking of material consumption, human beings, overall, are much better off today than their predecessors ever were on this planet. On the other hand, it is also a world - thanks precisely to the growth of human numbers, consumption and technology - where the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has passed the level of 410 parts per million, where three-quarters of the world's insects have disappeared over a few decades, indicating, as Charbonnier puts it, 'that the transformation of the Earth is now taking place at a pace commensurable with the length of a single life, and even of a simple writing project' (p. 1). It is a world in which the association - 'long viewed as necessary - between autonomy and modernity, between the sense of liberty and the uses of the Earth' increasingly appears unviable (p. 245) The memory of postwar prosperity in the West still lives on, the rising and visible affluence in nations like China and India are there for all to see, and yet the world seems 'so close to us' but 'already so old' (p. 251). Or, as Charbonnier puts it elsewhere, the price of so many humans living it up as if there were no tomorrow is the damage we end up doing to the life-support system of the planet: 'All the biogeochemical cycles that structure the global economy are being pushed beyond their capacity for regeneration by the rhythm of productive activities; the nature of our soil, air and water is changing, thereby creating a new context for human collectives and their struggles' (pp. 4-5).

Charbonnier asks whether humans can continue to flourish in a deteriorating world. This query shapes one of the intellectual horizons for his project - how to imagine the future of human freedoms at a time when we cannot afford any longer to ignore 'the process of planetary disruption that is leading us into the unknown' (p. 6). He writes:

The theoretical and political imperative of the present is therefore to reinvent freedom in the age of climate crisis - i.e., in the Anthropocene. Contrary to what one sometimes hears, it is not a matter of stating that infinite freedom in a finite world is impossible, but that this freedom can be gained only by establishing a socializing and sustainable relation with the material world. (p. 25)

But what would those freedoms be? And whose freedom? Of humans alone? How did the idea of human autonomy come to treat 'nature' as external to 'society'? If the task with regard to the future was to create a political order inseparable from the ecological one, then the properly historical question would be: how did they come to be separated? And when?

To answer this second question, the one amenable to historical analysis, Charbonnier invents a method that is as impressive for its originality and inventiveness as for the sustained, deep, and vigorously anticolonial erudition that this book presents to the reader. He tells two stories at once. One is the story about how, in modern Anglo-European political thought beginning in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, ideas of personhood and autonomy that once acknowledged, in however attenuated a form, their entanglement in the materiality of the Earth through the category 'land', gradually - in tandem with changes in infrastructures and institutions - yielded place to categories like 'society' and 'economy' that appeared to float free of the Earth, the latter now regarded as a mere repository of 'resources' for the use of humans (pp. 244-5). The result was that projects for 'autonomy', dependent on the assumption of abundance in the sphere of economy, lost all sense of their material entanglements even as the Earth - as all the climate-related statistics make clear - began to approach a state of exhaustion.

To get to the heart of this story, one has to begin with the emergence of the 'modern' world. Announcing his historical interests, Charbonnier tells the reader early on:

Even before the race to extract resources (a race that combined the notions of progress and material development) swung fully into action in the nineteenth century . the legal, moral and scientific coordinates of the modern relationship with the Earth were already in place. . [T]o understand the empires built on oil, the struggles for environmental justice and the disturbing trends in climatology, we must go back to the agronomy, law and economic thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; to Grotius, to Locke and...