Environmental Reflexivity and the Social Sciences

From a historical standpoint, and particularly from the perspective of the history of ideas, the introduction of the concept of the Anthropocene represents a major break in contemporary thought, specifically in what might be called environmental reflexivity. If one understands this to mean the vast trend toward the politicization of nature and the integration by social actors and the social sciences of a concern for environments and nature, it must be acknowledged that this shift did not occur all at once. From the first environmental warnings during the Industrial Revolution to the rise of an ecological counterculture and the creation of government institutions, the social appropriation of the material world has gone through several phases, as have the theoretical frameworks that conceptualize this process. For the concept of the Anthropocene to prevail, the traditional conceptual tools used to explain the relationship between society and its natural environment had to reach an impasse such that recourse to this new category became necessary. Indeed, the issues addressed by this concept were already well known when it first took off: climate change, the erosion of biodiversity, the limits of the dominant energy model, and evidence of the massive destabilization of biophysical equilibria had been debated in international scientific and diplomatic circles for several decades.Footnote ⁴ Thus the Anthropocene does not refer to something that has only recently been discovered—though climate science has made enormous strides—but rather to a new way of organizing knowledge pertaining to the relationship between humans and nature, and of envisioning its political implications.

To grasp this emerging organization of knowledge, one must first delineate the three aspects of environmental reflexivity the Anthropocene seeks to address. First, the concept refers to an event affecting our planet: only a profound transformation of the conditions through which geological layers and climate cycles are formed can justify adding a new name to the sequence of geological epochs. The emission of human-made greenhouse gasses and their chemical and biological consequences have ultimately impacted the Earth System’s self-regulation and led to a new epoch, following the Holocene. The second discontinuity advanced by the concept of the Anthropocene concerns the history of humans as a natural species, participating in the evolution of living things and thus embedded in the Earth System’s history. As humans become agents of geological change, their own history is also thrown into turmoil. While they, like all other living species, have always been ecological actors engaged in constructing their milieu, this evolutionary agency has assumed a new dimension with the onset of the technological and demographic phenomena associated with modernity. The Anthropocene means that industrial modernity, which had previously been conceived as a historical phase, is also a significant event in natural evolution, as it changes the conditions of other living creatures and the abiotic environment on a hitherto unseen scale. The third discontinuity, finally, is the one with which we introduced this essay: the reconfiguration of knowledge produced by the introduction of the Anthropocene as a category of thought. In addition to geological and evolutionary discontinuities, we thus have a rupture in the history of thought that seeks to mirror the two others. Its difference lies in the fact that this process is no longer blind, extending through time as an impersonal chain of cause and effect, but reflexive. The idea, in this sense, is to find conceptual translations of material developments and to forge intellectual frameworks that can explain them and expose them to critical examination. This rupture occurs on a more modest historical scale: that of modernity and its related categories of thought, and specifically the history of modern science.Footnote ⁵ Yet, curiously, while the Anthropocene has had resounding success in the social sciences—even more than in the natural sciences—the conditions in which it emerged as a concept have rarely been examined.

These circumstances, however, are very distinctive, given the state of the social sciences in the early twenty-first century. For some twenty years, their constituent disciplines have been experiencing a profound crisis tied to a breakdown in their methods and foundational concepts. The universalist aspirations of industrial nations that underpinned sociology, anthropology, and history, as well as the matrix that was the conflict between the market and the state, have gradually dissolved due to changes in behavior, the economy, and broader political structures. The challenge now facing the social sciences is to find purpose in a world so different from the one into which they were born. For many scholars, however, the climate crisis seems to provide a new empirical and normative ground, which could play a structural role in the constitution of social sciences that are finally able to take full measure of the collapse of the dualistic, colonial, liberal, and productivist order. In such conditions, the Anthropocene no longer refers exclusively to a geological era, but also to the latest entity upon which things and ideas are projected, as well as to the threat hovering over this entity—in other words, it is nothing less than the condition that makes the present intelligible. This dire context explains the radical nature of the hopes and ambitions invested in the concept of the Anthropocene and accounts for the specificity of its reception in the social sciences in contrast to the Earth sciences. The addition of the Anthropocene to geological time-scales is a more modest and local operation,Footnote ⁶ which has been completely overshadowed by its historical, sociological, and philosophical interpretations.

Whatever the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s final decision, the Anthropocene has already become an outlet for those seeking renewal in the social sciences—and perhaps in philosophy, too, as we shall see. Yet these aspirations are neither neutral, nor transparent, nor universally shared. Indeed, for part of the social science community, the only meaningful position is to acknowledge the dissolution of anthropological, sociological, and even naturalist universals and develop a practice that has decisively emancipated itself from what can be described, at best, as “grand narratives.” For others, the crisis in the social sciences is a myth, nineteenth-century categories are still relevant, and climate concerns are just another postmodern ideology. Consequently, if a robust interpretation of the Anthropocene as the new empirical and normative ground for the present is to offer the possibility of renewal, the quest for such a foundation by these disciplines must be considered legitimate. In this way, the meaning of the Anthropocene is tied, over and above debates in the environmental humanities, to the state of the social sciences in general.

Nature in Modernity: Risk and Limits

The human and social sciences, political thought, and philosophy have been occupied, for at least three decades, with trying to undo the great partition between nature and society. This task has seemingly been achieved by the sociology of science and technology, gender studies, and the anthropology of nature, among other fields. It is now commonly accepted that objects and knowledge cannot be organized according to a sharp division between human conventions and physical regularities, as was the case in post-Kantian configurations of the human sciences. Yet it must also be acknowledged that no alternative hegemonic position has thus far prevailed. True, a radical antinaturalism did result from the rejection of essentialisms that were deemed illegitimate, but only rarely did it go so far as to claim that nothing exists prior to conventions and constructions. Conversely, the naturalization of the social sciences was, for a while, an ambitious project, but its impact on the work of historians and sociologists remained marginal.Footnote ⁷ Between these views, a wide spectrum of positions has arisen, the most interesting and productive of which have recognized that the distinction between the natural and the social, far from being merely an epistemological system that can be freely done and undone, is tied to the organization of collective experience and to the distribution of people and things as constituted at least since early modern times.Footnote ⁸ Whatever the validity and future of this political organization, it has long structured our ideas and practices by ensuring that non-humans are incorporated into the realm of human exchanges and valorizations. It is, in this sense, an ontological or cosmological system. That moderns think of themselves as beings who live inside society but outside nature is a configuration that is hardly self-evident and which contains within it certain forms of reflexivity. Dependent upon this configuration, their task is precisely to bring it to light—and even to transcend it.

The connection between the social sciences and the nature-culture complex has undergone such a profound reorganization that the very idea of society, conceived as a locus of interaction and exchange that is positively constructed by the will and determinations of human actors, is at risk, whether at a strictly epistemological levelFootnote ⁹ or because of the challenges posed by political ecology. The crisis of the social sciences thus overlaps to a significant degree with the crisis of modernity in its relationship with nature. Our hypothesis here is that two major categories of sociological reasoning—risk and limits—made it possible to benefit empirically and theoretically from this crisis by acknowledging the warning that modernity has received from nature—that is, from what used to be called “objects” and “externalities,” which have found their way back into our political destiny. These two categories constituted until recently the primary elements of the nature-modernity problem in the social sciences of the postwar period—ending with the emergence of the Anthropocene. Indeed, this concept consolidated its success by hastening the demise of these two paradigms which, with the onset of the controversy on climate change, no longer provided scholars with a relevant organizing principle. As confused as the Anthropocene “event” has been in the realm of contemporary knowledge, it appears, at present, as an answer to the exhausted explanatory power of two previous and coexisting theoretical regimes, which constitute its immediate genealogical antecedents.

Let us begin with the conventional view that modernity is a project in which the social is conceived as an autonomous sphere that determines its own existence through a positive construction of the rules of social order and authority. Whether one accepts this undertaking on its own terms or views it as a myth, the project bequeathed by the Enlightenment implies a heuristic discrepancy between the realm of constituent beings, who give themselves their own laws, and those beings that are the objects of this autonomous sphere: the things we own and consume that affect us materially, not politically. This arrangement, which has been widely discussed, is ultimately the common denominator of classical contract theory and modern political economy. While it has always been subject to criticism, notably in a socialist vein, only recently has the perspective of nature emerged as a decisive challenge to this legacy. The ethical and political valorization of the environment was first articulated in the 1970s as a rejection of anthropocentric positions.Footnote ¹⁰ Implicitly, it went hand in hand with a circumvention of sociological rationality: the ecocentric vision of the unity of humans and other living things forbids, as a matter of principle, thinking that is based on the division of labor, economics, or norms in their specifically political aspects.Footnote ¹¹ Without denying this tradition’s productive character, it must nonetheless be distinguished from a later movement that sought to introduce nature as a critical actor from within sociological and historical thought as it had developed. Advocating the non-differentiation of humans and nature at an ontological and normative level, as environmental ethics does, is completely different from considering the relationship with nature as a social phenomenon. In the first case, the very idea of society is an anthropocentric concept that must be abandoned; in the second, collective relationships with nature are conceived as an important aspect of social life.

Reconsidering the modern political experience from the standpoint of nature does not offer an unlimited number of possibilities. Two strategies come to the fore. The first conceptual and empirical option to have emerged in recent decades in the theoretical realm consists of showing the extent to which the project of political autonomy and, by extension, emancipation from nature is contingent on physical and material conditions—and may even be entirely illusory. By collecting data on metabolic exchanges and energy dependencies between the social world and nature since the Industrial Revolution, a vast body of work has contributed to constructing a counternarrative, the critical underpinning of which rests, to a significant degree, on the concept of limits. This work is based on the general idea that it is possible to contrast the cornucopian ideal—in other words, the promotion of material abundance, born in the eighteenth century and contemporaneous with the emancipation of land and labor from the burdens of the feudal systemFootnote ¹²—with the systemic disturbances that this ideal, whether consciously or otherwise, ultimately provokes. In the history of thought, this theoretical strategy goes back quite far, at least to Friedrich EngelsFootnote ¹³ and perhaps to Thomas Malthus,Footnote ¹⁴ although the encounter between the principle of resource limitation and the perspective of environmental thought did not occur until quite recently, beginning probably in the 1960s and 1970s. An analytical model of metabolic exchanges between humans and their environment emerged in the modern sciences and gradually metamorphosed during the nineteenth century into social materialism. Only much later were this body of work and these methods used to call into question progress and industrial development. The metabolic approach to the social is thus an older theoretical tradition that was translated into a distinct historical and political context when it first became apparent that the postwar economic boom was slowing: only then did the paradigm of limits truly become ascendant.Footnote ¹⁵ To think of society’s embeddedness in nature from the standpoint of limits thus implies adopting an analysis on a systemic scale, which views human societies as material realities that are involved in physical, chemical, and biological exchanges with their environment—the latter being both a local living space (landscapes, cultivated land, resources) and a global system (the planet and, beyond that, the sun that provides it with energy). In this paradigm, the principal phenomenon that characterizes modernity is economic growth and the material development it enabled—in other words, progress understood not in the sense of an evolutionary ideology but as the sum of numerous concrete events that overwhelmingly led from a model of agricultural subsistence to one of industrial abundance. The history of technologies, and notably of energy technologies, is fundamental in this context: it is the factor that allows for the incorporation of greater natural forces into social life. This way of thinking rests primarily on a quantitative reading of modernity: it consists above all in increased material flows and exchanges at the planetary level, which have been particularly evident since World War II and the “great acceleration.”Footnote ¹⁶

Most of the disciplines in the human sciences have contributed to the description of what might be called the metabolism of modernity, borrowing from the models of bioeconomicsFootnote ¹⁷ and industrial ecology,Footnote ¹⁸ or simply using the tools offered by environmental historyFootnote ¹⁹ and the history of technologyFootnote ²⁰ in their most materialist forms. Geography and rural sociology participated in this movement, notably by emphasizing the evolution of agrarian systems and of forms of consumption.Footnote ²¹ Darwinian and neo-Darwinian frameworks served to connect the evolution of human behavior to that of its environment and even supplied the basis for radical ecological philosophies.Footnote ²² From a methodological perspective, systems theory, thermodynamics, and related epistemologies typically provided these projects with a common theoretical framework, particularly in their application to economic thought.Footnote ²³ At a more normative level, a wide range of political outlooks benefited from this work. The metabolic interpretation of modernity provided arguments to those who wanted to restore confidence in technological solutions to the crisis,Footnote ²⁴ as well as to the founders of degrowth. In both cases, the concept of limits proved central. Whether one seeks to overcome limits or to invoke their imperative nature, the idea of a confrontation between a socioeconomic world and environmental constraints constitutes, in a sense, the empirical and theoretical a priori of a vast field of research.

The other major paradigm that has brought nature back into modernity revolves around the concept of risk. At the first level of interpretation, it must be noted that the objective buildup of risks due to technology, or simply made more visible by scientific developments (as with health risks), have provided the social sciences with important material. This has resulted in the emergence of a sociology, anthropology, and geography of risk and catastrophes, with significant implications for governance and public health. The ultimately tautological idea of a “social construction of risk” gradually prevailed as a means of calling attention to the fact that it is precisely social modes of apprehending nature that are in question. But the epistemological and political significance of risk becomes apparent only if we imagine it, at another level of analysis, as a new paradigm for the social sciences in general in their capacity to understand the contemporary world. To borrow Ulrich Beck’s term, one can speak of a “risk society,” that is, of a stage in modernity’s development during which collective exposure to risk has become the essential criterion for defining the present.Footnote ²⁵ According to Beck, not only did the model of linear progress inherited from the first phase of industrial modernity collapse by the 1980s, but so did the intellectual categories connected to it, which formed the intellectual apparatus of the social sciences: national sovereignty, social class, merit, nature, reality, science, and, most importantly, commodities. The vision outlined in Beck’s 1986 book is striking: soon, there would no longer be borders (as demonstrated by Chernobyl), social classes (exposure to risk does not follow income inequality), external nature (the ideal of mastery has been achieved), or science (certainty is dead, and our way of accessing the world is purely political).

But Beck’s most powerful thesis, which posits a historical discontinuity, is his announcement of the end of commodities. Contrary to everything that political economy and its critics maintained, commodities are no longer the sole and irreplaceable objects of exchange, since the lateral effects of productive activities (previously known as externalities, such as pollution or other harmful factors) now entail greater costs and preventative measures that are likely to constrain the economic world as a whole. And it is precisely because nature had been conceived of as a reality prior and external to the economy, a simple reservoir from which wealth, raw materials, and other factors of production could be drawn, that its return produced such devastating effects. According to Beck, the need for postmodern societies to incorporate externalities into their economic and intellectual systems amounts to crossing a threshold of reflexivity hitherto unknown or deliberately rendered invisible. Integrating risk into the model inherited from the industrial era is what makes modernity reflexive, in that it must now envision as its own that which it had previously placed outside its parameters. Without tracing every idea about risk back to Beck, it must be recognized that he proposed a theory capable of bringing together a wide range of scholarship. In particular, he saw early on that risk affected the social world at the local level (it does not only produce victims) and that it could reconfigure not only the modern order as such, but also the categories created to analyze it.

Like that of limits, the paradigm of risk also united all the human sciences, even if sociology remained at the heart of this trend. The sociology of science and political studies were particularly receptive to these historical transitions,Footnote ²⁶ emphasizing respectively the collapse of the distinction between science and politics and the emergence of new forms of power based on regulation and the acceptance of collective vulnerability.Footnote ²⁷ Thus a history of risk was born, and, while it upended the periodization proposed by Beck, it enriched its social implications more than it limited them.Footnote ²⁸ Economics, for its part, pioneered the concept of externality and attempted to incorporate it into marginalist models in the form of costs arising from uncertainty and vulnerability.Footnote ²⁹ Philosophy, through the concepts of responsibility and future generations,Footnote ³⁰ also operated within the risk paradigm, often by hyperbolically amplifying its social and moral consequences, as seen in catastrophism.Footnote ³¹ Finally, in keeping with the concept of “ecological modernization,”Footnote ³² much governmental discourse on the environment borrowed this rhetoric and rationality and proposed measures to confront the “acceptability” of risk.

Three brief remarks will conclude this overview of the theoretical models under consideration. First, it must be emphasized that, very strikingly, the fields of risk and limits emerged without coordination and have remained isolated from one another. While Beck proved lucid on this issue by explicitly rejecting the sociological contributions of materialist approaches, which he deemed “technocratic and naturalistic,”Footnote ³³ the mutual indifference of these two paradigms is most often implicit. The sociology of science, whether in the English-speaking world or in Bruno Latour’s version, remains ignorant of the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Joan Martinez-Alier; global histories of material flows have little use for the trajectory of modernity’s reflexivity; and theoretical frameworks that emphasize degrowth and are closely tied to the question of risk developed separately from an interest in technological democracy or “hybrid forums.”Footnote ³⁴ It is rare for the very same intellectual movement—the reinterpretation of modernity from the standpoint of nature—to develop into two such incompatible versions. Second, this is not the case when it comes to the relationship between the realm of knowledge and public mobilization around the environment, where activist practices and the values that sustain them do not reflect this same split. The objections formulated against growth-based economies, consumerism, and modes of production have in fact most often been organically tied to the public exposure of industrial and health-related risks. While the history and sociology of environmentalism result in the identification of somewhat different—and even irreconcilableFootnote ³⁵—modes of mobilization and justification, they do not follow the contours of the split between risk and limits, which is relevant only to the question of forms of knowledge. Finally, at the epistemological level, it might be suggested that thinking in terms of risk and limits makes it possible to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional opposition between constructivism and realism (or objectivism). This terminology, the subject of frequent discussions during the “science wars” of the 1990s, reached its limits when both positions became caricatures of themselves. With no outside left to “construct,” constructivism got lost in a self-referential game of discourse, while realism parroted facts, most often in support of conservative positions. Revisiting this theoretical controversy from a new starting point would seem to provide an occasion for reconsidering its implications and acknowledging its political dimension, which a strictly methodological and ontological approach tends to treat as secondary.

Politicizing Nature: Between Success and Dead Ends

These two theoretical paradigms, each in its own way, allow us to take full measure of the challenge of returning to nature from within modernity or, rather, of the imperative of confronting that which had previously been kept at a safe distance. Indeed, the ideal of autonomy embodied in the project of a “constitution”—that is, of sovereignty over collective determinations—seems to have foundered on the unexpected irruption of nature, both as a physical force that existed alongside industrial and democratic efforts from the outset, and as the result of a political compromise aimed at what Latour calls “purification.”Footnote ³⁶

In terms of limits, the redescription of modernity has, for the most part, eluded Beck’s charge of triviality and naturalism. By going against the dominant discourse employed by modernizers to describe their project, it has been possible to demonstrate that the political emancipation of Western societies was embedded in a material system that could not possibly be conceived as purely external or contingent. The world-economy forged on the basis of the great discoveries was, of course, a cultural phenomenon,Footnote ³⁷ but greater attention to its material character has clarified its contours.Footnote ³⁸ Cheap resources and manpower in the form of seized land and forced laborFootnote ³⁹—enormous boons for the European empires—and the ability to harness underground fossil fuelsFootnote ⁴⁰ constituted the basic ingredients of an unequal system of global exchange, whose ecological dimension was central. Beyond simply providing a straightforward factual summary of physical exchanges, interest in industrial and commercial metabolisms has brought to light dimensions of modernity that had previously garnered little attention. Fossil fuels and colonial territories, which Kenneth Pomeranz sees as the primary factors in the Western economic takeoff, share in the fact that, politically speaking, they are largely invisible.Footnote ⁴¹ The supply of energy is ensured by social classes that hold little power, in a system in which the advanced division of tasks tends to separate the protection of labor from the protection of nature. Colonial territories are geographically removed from industrial and political centers, in a way that fostered the belief that Western hegemony had less to do with strategically arranged material advantages than with an inevitable civilizational logic. Non-intentional factors also played a role in this natural history of global capitalism, including certain consequences of the Columbian ExchangeFootnote ⁴²—the transmission of biological agents across the Atlantic by navigators and colonists—which also functioned to amplify ecological inequality. The paradigm of limits has favored greater reflexivity about modern history’s course, in that it has counterbalanced a fundamentally idealistic political consciousness that gave pride of place to symbolic and normative themes in the interpretation of the past two centuries. The emergence of environmental consciousness is itself a part of this story. Ramachandra Guha has studied the awareness of social vulnerability as it is related to resources and the Earth’s physical configuration—that is, as a function of the global division of labor.Footnote ⁴³ The affinity between the ecological viewpoint and the global dimension of the social sciences thus takes the form of a decolonization of environmentalism, which is too often formulated in terms that take for granted a superior colonial position.Footnote ⁴⁴ This theoretical model thus aspires to symmetry: instead of denouncing as illusory the political voluntarism that drove the modernizing faith, it reinterprets it as the correlate of the material systems it created and of which it is also the partial outcome.

Yet this commitment to symmetry has not always prevailed. Indeed, the metabolic interpretation of modernity has also lent itself to attempts to replace the historical process with a blind, impersonal causality in which material forces are considered the only relevant agents. This approach was first introduced to prove that the human sciences were scientific, in that energy available per inhabitant could be presented as an objective indicator of cultural development.Footnote ⁴⁵ Social development was thereby once again reduced to material development, as had been the case in nineteenth-century conjectural history; positive and negative political interpretations could then be grafted onto it. For example, once technological and energy-related mechanisms are aligned with a class of leaders and their interests, modern history seems to manifest itself as the imposition of an economic and environmental norm on the essentially passive working-class masses, whose role is reduced to accepting hegemonic models of production and consumption that are beyond criticism. The concept of “metabolic rift” developed by John Foster tends to legitimate this insight: by attributing to Karl Marx the idea that capitalism harbors an original environmental pathology, it presents the industrial order as an inflexible process that, from its very inception, harbored a socio-ecological rupture, of which climate change is simply the mechanical conclusion.Footnote ⁴⁶ From this standpoint, the totality of social facts inherent to the development of techno-scientific modernity is overlooked in favor of a direct confrontation between a complete economic system and a natural environment whose reality is confined to the limits it imposes on this system.

While the reduction of history to impersonal mechanisms is the epistemological impasse most commonly encountered in the paradigm of limits, this framework also contains another inherent difficulty, which has probably played an even more important historical role. The most virulent indictments of the ecological pressures generated by industrial civilization have taken the form of an anticipatory discourse in which the demographic and economic explosion is presented as a radical existential threat. The two most famous examples of this scientific and political strategy are Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth.Footnote ⁴⁷ Though they take different paths, the scenario central to both texts is one of a more or less dramatic collapse that requires drastic political measures: the idea, consequently, is to expose the political sphere to facts, pure physical and biological facts, that are capable of eliciting a reaction commensurate with the threat. In this respect, the failure of the paradigm of limits is striking. On the one hand, its predictions have often proved too alarmist (Ehrlich’s thesis being a well-known example), and the goal of making an impression on the collective imagination has proved self-defeating as catastrophist discourses have been discredited. On the other hand, modern political decision-making systems have, in recent decades, shown themselves to be impotent in the face of such challenges. Whether or not the facts invoked are valid, political inertia and “business as usual” seem beyond the reach of neo-Malthusian arguments. The strategy of relying on facts to pressure political and industrial authorities either does not work or works poorly, which begs the question of the nature of these forms of power.

Yet this is precisely the type of operation at work within the paradigm of risk. Studies having to do with the notion of risk society—the management of uncertainty, the new relationship between science and politics, new ways of mobilizing lay actors—in seeking to wed democracy and rationality, have brought into sharp relief the categories of modern political thought. Risk puts political reason to the test at a fundamental level, and, in so doing, shows nature to be a major destabilizing force. This insight makes sense only if one accepts that modern society has, for most of its history, remained in a state of innocence vis-à-vis the uncertainty and long-term consequences of its productive activities—and even that this innocence is a characteristic of modern society in its pre-reflexive phase. More fundamentally, placing risk at the heart of a major political transformation and making it the symbol of the beginning of the modern era’s second phase implies the wholesale adoption of political liberalism’s dominant and self-generated image.

Indeed, one of the central but often forgotten ideas informing social contract theory and political economy in the late eighteenth century—in other words, the foundations of liberal culture—was the necessity of abandoning what one might call ecological sovereignty or, to use Adam Smith’s term, the “superintending” activities of the state.Footnote ⁴⁸ The ambition to radically dissociate the protection of individual rights and liberties from the administration of resources and the creation of wealth has profoundly impacted political modernity. Certain knowledge and expertise made it possible to conceive of resource allocation as an autonomous mechanism, governed by a rationality immanent to economic practices and the play of interests and therefore, ideally, emancipated from all political control. Once the management of subsistence was delegated to the private sphere and its ability to self-organize via the sanctification of exclusive private property, the state’s regulatory capacities could concentrate on what was most essential, that is, the defense of rights, defined as what lies outside the individual’s economic connections. But the logic of depoliticizing nature holds up only at the speculative level—as a creed applied with varying success in different times and placesFootnote ⁴⁹ or, more simply, as a utopia.Footnote ⁵⁰ The division of responsibilities between the state and the market has never been realized in the ideal form conceived by liberals, although this discourse of modernity has had performative effects. Indeed, the state has intervened on a regular basis in the economy and has implemented measures to compensate for the negative effects of a market society, notably in the realm of currency and labor.

Yet seeing risk as a major sociological rupture implies that the liberal framework, belatedly and abruptly, discovered its own unforeseen consequences and destabilizing effects. In a sense, to fully apply the rationality of risk, one must embrace a liberal interpretation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; only in this way does a discrepancy appear between a linear, unproblematic phase of modernization and a later phase, condemned to reflexivity by a rising number of catastrophes. Even if risk, with all its political derivatives, is a very potent instrument for analyzing industrial society, the historical background against which it is conceptualized is incomplete. This is true not only because history teaches us that risk was present from the beginnings of industrial civilization, but also because taking into account this long view of history implies that the contemporary political world has long been accustomed to managing such phenomena.Footnote ⁵¹ The point is not that liberalism, understood as the marriage of contractualist politics and an economy premised on property and private enterprise, has often contradicted its principles by authorizing state intervention in domains from which it should, in theory, be forbidden, but rather that the state itself played an ambiguous role in creating a market society and thus in producing risks. The state never established itself unequivocally either as a supporter of the economy and economic actors or as a counterpower to them, but rather as a regulating authority caught between two sets of constraints that must be reconciled. The state’s indifference to the economy’s social effects, and notably to those resulting from the natural environment’s inability to amortize and absorb every externality, is a highly debatable starting point for analyzing the present, especially when the objective is to transcend existing political frameworks.

The fact that the sociology of risk has been tainted by the liberal imagination has had important consequences for this model’s development and explains rather well the variety of interpretations to which it has lent itself. In French sociology in the 1990s and 2000s, for example, the subject of risk was embraced as democracy’s new frontier, notably because it called attention to various individual and collective actors who could seize control of the instruments of techno-scientific governance, thus providing citizens with greater protection.Footnote ⁵² Whether through whistle-blowing or participatory forums, the mobilization around major health and environmental scandals that occurred during these years proved that the public could, on its own initiative, politicize an issue that had been previously neglected. The need to arm critics was a response to the very nature of the phenomena being brought to light: given that the physical constitution of bodies, spaces, and environments was at issue, a hitherto missing connection needed to be made between political participation and the natural condition, drawing attention to those aspects of the social body that are most corporeal and organic. Nature does not in and of itself put technological power to the test, but new segments of the public have shown that they too can speak in nature’s name, in epistemological circumstances that can withstand charges of paranoia and irrationality.

Though it starts from the same insight, the other interpretation of risk presents a very different picture. If the productive system’s negative externalities affect society to the point that it reacts and protects itself, economic and governmental spheres may very well act preemptively to incorporate the management and regulation of these risks into their normal operations. In this case public activism may find itself at a disadvantage for being external to the economic world and its principles, while the actors directly responsible for generating risks can claim that they alone are in a position to compensate for their effects since they know them better than anyone else. The corporate world can then integrate into its distinctive rationality an element of what is now called social and/or environmental responsibility and anticipate risk by creating structures for research, forecasting, and safeguarding. From the outset of the modern economy, measures such as insurance were employed to bring security to certain activities, in close connection with the question of nature. Innovations of this kind expanded with the rise of secondary markets such as consulting and image management, and more recently with compensatory markets such as carbon trading—that is, the trade in polluting rights. Such phenomena do not completely minimize the relevance of the democratic perspective outlined above, but they do reconfigure its meaning. From very early on, liberalism had to face the challenge of risk; built into it, therefore, were mechanisms that could incorporate risk as often as possible, using standard economic instruments or relying on the popular vote.Footnote ⁵³ Whether one conceives of risk as a form of critique (that is, a way of politicizing questions that are often overlooked) or whether one criticizes risk as a modality of economic discourse (since thinking in terms of risk means remaining within the matrix of regulating society through the market), one is dealing with two inseparable dimensions of contemporary political reason.

How Can One Still Be Constructivist?

If one considers the main empirical and normative features of the paradigms of risk and limits, climate change might seem like a boon. Indeed, metabolic rationality seems well prepared for the biochemical and social upheaval that would result from a rise in the planet’s average temperatures, if only because it is involved in uncovering these phenomena. The concept of risk is also well suited for studying catastrophes and the new forms of responsibility tied to this crisis. Climate change appears to be the de facto encounter between and perfect fusion of these two processes: it is a global risk, caused by the fact that society has progressed beyond key biophysical thresholds,Footnote ⁵⁴ and should have an epistemological corollary. Yet in reality the situation is more complex, and the theoretical models cannot be so easily combined. Our hypothesis, rather, is that the emergence of this global risk triggered the collapse of preexisting paradigms, of which the concept of the Anthropocene is the symptom, if not the successor. The peaceful coexistence and reciprocal indifference of the two models has become impossible; while they may share a common theme, they approach it from different—and perhaps even incompatible—theoretical viewpoints.

This transition was provoked by various contingent phenomena, such as poor predictions by neo-Malthusian thinkers and the ambiguities inherent to the concept of risk. The sociology of risk, moreover, had also embraced a scenario of the future that did not come to pass: the postindustrial society depicted by Beck and his successors, in which modernity’s reflexive capacities would articulate and then overcome its destructive tendencies, never happened. The preservation and revitalization of productive sectors remain essential to the current political agenda, as the energy question shows, and the traditional economic inequalities addressed by nineteenth-century thinkers have not been replaced by dematerialized social configurations—particularly at the global level. On the specific question of the collective relationship with nature introduced by modernity, these obstacles are secondary to the effects provoked in the social sciences. Climate change is a global risk: this term is, at present, used to refer to a variety of phenomena, such as pandemics and terrorism, but it is particularly apt when applied to the climate. The rise of the planet’s average temperatures affects the physical and biological basis of social life in its entirety such that nothing in principle can be considered external to these disruptions. Instances of pollution or contamination, which were the main focus for thinking in terms of risk, are no longer the question. Henceforth, it is the global deployment of nature itself that functions as a pollutant in a pathological form. This characteristic undermines the foundations of precautionary rationality and compensatory measures, since events such as the massive loss of biodiversity, the disappearance of an island-state, or future climate migrations lie beyond the reach of local regulatory or reparative measures created to respond to conventional risks. In these circumstances, risk saturates the entire social experience, insofar as it derives from biological humanity. The socio-ecological metabolism unleashed in the era of fossil fuels and industrial development converges with the emergence of risk of a new magnitude, participating in the same historical process, as much in terms of its material mechanisms as in the political structures that frame it.Footnote ⁵⁵ Whether or not this physical-political configuration, which forces one to consider the realm of things and that of ideas in the same cognitive act, is new remains open to question. There is good reason to believe, for example, that the nuclear order of the Cold War already displayed some of these characteristics.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is why it is essential to analyze the events that ended up concretely threatening the two available paradigms by testing one last time the productive nature of their shared conceptual space.

It is less the emergence of climate consciousness per se that served as a catalyst for the epistemological crisis than the controversy surrounding its causes. Since the late 1970s, the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere has become the focus of increasingly specific measures and of diffuse political interest. Collective scientific authorities were gradually established not only to hone the evidence of growing CO₂ concentration, but also to find proof that these changes were caused by human activity. Significant progress was made in the 1990s, as it became possible to identify the specific signature of human alterations to the atmosphere’s chemical composition as opposed to non-human alterations due, for example, to the varying intensity of solar radiation. These developments occurred at the same time as a totally unprecedented institutional process leading to the establishment of an international climate research group under the aegis of the United Nations: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Each report issued by this organization now punctuates the political and scientific history of the climate, which has become the focus of international mobilization. At the same time, research groups financed more or less directly by conservative think tanks began developing so-called climate-skeptic positions, arguing that no significant climate change has taken place, that such change is not caused by humans, or that, if it has occurred, it is beneficial. The George C. Marshall Institute played a key role in formulating these skeptical beliefs, attracting, through the early 2010s, a significant share of public opinion, as well as—and especially—the support of public authorities.Footnote ⁵⁷

From an epistemological point of view, this controversy has been of crucial importance. The strategy of denial took advantage of the scientific and political characteristics of the climate question in particularly skillful ways, such that it was able to shatter the social sciences’ constructivist position on the topic. Indeed, establishing the human origins of climate change as a scientific fact is an incredibly complex task, which requires institutional and technological interventions on an unprecedented scaleFootnote ⁵⁸ and which, most importantly, seems never to arrive at the perfectly stable state of traditional scientific theories. This complex array of statements and measures, which includes significant areas of uncertainty and doubt, as well as a large number of probabilities, is nevertheless based on a well-established thesis. Not only do these scientific facts leave plenty of room for disagreement—which in and of itself is not unusual—but their very status as scientific facts is fragile. And it is precisely the epistemological and political status of climate change that has made it vulnerable to deniers. From the standpoint of the sociology of science, scientific activity consists in proposing experimental and conceptual tests in such a way that hypotheses and models can be gradually extracted from their conditional status to be accepted as facts.Footnote ⁵⁹ But when it comes to the climate, the difficulty of tracing a clear boundary between fact and hypothesis has been interpreted by some as proof of a fundamental scientific flaw, compromising science in this domain by condemning it to ceaseless wandering and, in particular, to ideological falsehoods: if proving climate change depends on large and highly politicized institutions, it must be bad science. The paradox of the “experimenter’s regress,” which is well known to sociologists and historians of science, has been used against scientific activity and its conclusions: the models developed can only detect climate variations that have been hypothesized, and there are no absolutely reliable criteria for determining their relevance.Footnote ⁶⁰ Climate science has an artisanal character: to get as close as possible to available data, models must be developed integrating a large number of parameters. Consequently, to undermine a hypothesis’s doctrinal core, all it takes is to emphasize the doubtful and uncertain qualities of the data and the “constructed” nature of the models used to formulate and interpret them. But this tactic overlooks the fact that the supposed circle between the hypothesis and the experiment does not really exist: residual uncertainty is not pure ignorance, since numerous alternative hypotheses may have been rejected or nuanced; the accumulation of small correlations sets out the contours of general knowledge; and certain scenarios can be formulated that are more likely than others. It also overlooks the fact that, politically speaking, probable knowledge is sufficient to determine action, especially when the stakes are so high.

In other words, the target of climate change skeptics has become twofold. Behind scientific arguments establishing the human causes of climate change—their first target—lies, more generally, sociological constructivism—that is, the methodological position underpinning the sociology of risk. More precisely, the sociological interpretation of science developed since the 1980s has, in a sense, been turned against itself: if one cannot separate “science” from the controversies to which it gives rise, then the unresolved controversy over the causes of climate change proves that it is not based in fact, but in hypotheses that can be legitimately called into doubt. From a sociological standpoint, the intertwining of science and politics is normalFootnote ⁶¹ and does not contradict science’s own ambitions; yet some have interpreted this situation as an objectionable compromise of principle that justifies preserving the status quo. Proponents of industry and energy interests have exploited this weakness by investing in doubt, compelling all concerned parties to approach the matter as a controversy, thus diverting attention from the key issue. The complexity of climate science is such that one can always find exceptions to the general rule, sometimes even in perfectly good faith. In this case, the sociological principle that scientific controversies come to an end only when their experimental phase is over and can only be brought to a conclusion by authoritative arguments has had a counterproductive result, from a scientific as well as a sociological standpoint. To counter the strategy of denial without violating the rules of the scientific game, the controversy should have concluded the usual way, with the thesis of human-made climate change protected from any experimental correction. But as long as the industry had capital at its disposal to finance doubt (with no end to this situation in sight), doubt appeared, from a sociological perspective, to be reasonable, especially since the media is always inclined to repeat skeptical arguments in the name of a flawed conception of pluralism.Footnote ⁶²

For all of these reasons, the constructivist sociological machine finally broke down, or, rather, was compelled to decisively redefine its own parameters. Clinging to a consensus-based model of scientific interpretation meant accepting skeptical reasoning and fighting it indefinitely in an arena where the ordinary back-and-forth of arguments and counter-arguments had been long distorted by the investment in doubt. For the social sciences focused on the climate and the environment more generally, the only possible solution, purely and simply, was to shift to a different level of reflection, thus leaving behind the pathological arena of climate-skeptic controversy captured by financial interests. This is what has occurred, on a massive scale, in the social sciences. The concept of the Anthropocene played a decisive role in this transformation of the theoretical realm, notably after the resounding failure of the Copenhagen summit in 2009, which concluded without an agreement and decisively shattered any confidence in traditional public deliberation and reflections on the concept of risk.

Anthropocene Rationality

When Paul Crutzen and his colleagues introduced the concept of the Anthropocene in the early 2000s, it still clearly belonged to the paradigm of limits, specifically in its techno-futurist variation. The first issue was the physical state of the planet, humanity’s material imprint on the Earth, and early texts on the topic, philosophical in tone, suggested that the only way to compensate for the end of natural exteriority (i.e., everything is now artifice) was through a techno-scientific response aligned with the ambitions of geoengineering.Footnote ⁶³ This conceptual tool was gradually incorporated into the discourse of the environmental humanities, notably by scholars from the sociology of science, such as Latour.Footnote ⁶⁴ In a sense, the term made it possible to give the catastrophe a name and evoke a totalizing image of the planet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests: after the “global” age, which emphasized the globalization of the economy and culture and the forms of domination and devaluation this implied, comes the “planetary” age, a synthesis made possible by the unity of humanity’s physical and biological substrate.Footnote ⁶⁵

Beginning in 2010, many intellectuals who had previously been focused on the evolution of modern categories of thought, whether tied to the environmental question or not, began to borrow from the metabolic idiom, which had previously been viewed warily as a version of naturalism or materialism. Climate change had become an object of more intense preoccupation and, in particular, had ceased to be conceivable in terms simply of risk or a risk society; it thus became the locus of a very striking epistemological crisis. The need for a new theoretical dimension released from the climate controversy’s (scientific or political) deviations, along with an awareness of the greater exposure of those parts of the world that were already penalized by the global economy, helped overcome reluctance to enter uncharted theoretical waters. It had become impossible to rely on societal deliberations and wait for the full range of scientific and political trials to be carried out in order for the “truth” to assert itself; recourse to the simple nature of things had once again become a legitimate register of thought. Many authors who at first were little inclined to think in material terms changed their attitude toward a hitherto neglected paradigm, sometimes even becoming, like Chakrabarty, its most ardent defenders. Long-standing proponents of a metabolic interpretation of modernity have in fact often found in the work of Latour, Chakrabarty, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Isabelle Stengers (among others) an a posteriori validation of their views: thinking in terms of development’s material limits is not only an appropriate response to the climate emergency, it is also the only point of view that is able to account for modernity’s original particularity, beyond the passing scientific constructs that have expressed it.

The epistemological crisis of the 2010s cannot be reduced to the triumph of metabolic materialism. Chakrabarty’s first essay on this topic, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,”Footnote ⁶⁶ suggests that the biophysical processes leading to climate change were the greatest oversight of modern rationality and notably the social sciences. Embracing this knowledge as an empirical and epistemological ground is, in his view, a suitable response to the climate question—as if ecological rationality had to wait for the most imminent danger to establish itself and prevail. But this is only one tradition in the social sciences, and it testifies primarily to the solidity of the boundary that kept materialist approaches out of the most prominent scholarship; for many researchers, the connection between modern history and the treatment of nature was hardly a novelty. A different interpretation can be offered of the effect of the climate question on the social sciences and the environmental humanities. True, elements brought to the debate by the materialist tradition have once again assumed an overwhelming importance, but these contributions belong to a theoretical space in which the primary concern is the political identity of late modern societies. The point is thus not to establish the ecological and technological facts relating to the modernization first of the West, then of the world—that is, to chronicle a process that is both fundamental and invisible. Such an approach would simply repeat the mistakes of materialism, which treats historical and social forms as no more than illusory surface phenomena. If the “Anthropocene” can put a name to a sociological and historical rationality, it is because this rationality considers the relationship between nature and society to be the contemporary world’s center of gravity and analytical framework. Risk and limits, two dimensions that previously were highly disconnected, now function as two facets of a single process involving objects, facts, and conventions and norms—that is, the means by which facts translate into the realm of practical human activity. “Ecologizing modernity,” to use Latour’s phrase,Footnote ⁶⁷ does not mean viewing the modern world as little more than a side effect of the thermo-industrial revolution; it means offering an ecological interpretation of categories of thought and action and of the ways in which objects and human beings are organized.

Many historical, anthropological, and sociological studies are already contributing to this Anthropocenic rationality. Its theoretical significance lies, most strikingly, in the fact that it introduces what might be called a second order materialism. In contrast to conventional materialism, this kind of materialism is not used to unmask categorial systems as secondary or illusory realities, but to show that the political trajectory of recent centuries rests on an entirely unique way of interacting with nature. Natural forces lie at the heart of historical and sociological thought, but they do not form an ontological register heterogeneous from their relation to human, institutional, and moral forces, which can also be viewed in material terms. Nature’s productive and distributive character, which has been recognized at least since ancient Greece,Footnote ⁶⁸ has been incorporated into social and political forms (though not necessarily in an ideal way) and has, in turn, endowed them with a material dimension that has now been rediscovered. This second order materialism is thus a complete materialism, which it would be tempting to call “historical” were the term not already taken. The logic shaping this configuration of collective relationships to nature can be approached comparatively, as in Philippe Descola’s work, or experimentally, as in Latour’s.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the realm of historiography, which is more concerned with the temporality of these dynamics and the conditions in which the contemporary crisis was forged, some scholarship has already adopted this point of view, blending the material life of institutions with the institutional life of matter. Three different models can be applied to three different historical periods: Fredrik Jonsson’s study of the Scottish Enlightenment and the problem of managing imperial frontiers in the preindustrial context of the eighteenth century; Pomeranz’s now-classic study of western Europe’s economic takeoff during the modern period; and Timothy Mitchell’s analysis of the relationship between energy and democracy in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Anthropocene thus defines human sociality and historicity in a new way—as the permanent incorporation of external conditions into collective dispositions to reflect and act on these very conditions. Regimes of environmental reflexivity stand out in particular, that is, different configurations of the relationship between the governing of humankind and the administration of things, of which the present configuration is merely one variant, neither more nor less true than the others. While climate change is not the only topic that can be considered from the standpoint of the Anthropocene, it appears—curiously—to be the standard model for social issues, rather than a recently discovered exception. Collective experience is still overwhelmed by the need to incorporate the facts of nature, whether or not that includes the destabilization of the planet’s physical substrate, and acting politically always implies having an effect on one’s environment.

The End of the World or the End of the Social Sciences?

The warm reception of the Anthropocene and all it encompasses owes much to a positive theoretical and historiographical development, namely that the climate crisis has generated knowledge that expresses the situation at the level of ideas. The end of the distinction between risk and limits, along with the creation of a third paradigm that includes the concept of the Anthropocene, are signs of a major epistemological transformation. But another aspect of the Anthropocenic turn risks compromising its intellectual productiveness, namely the dramatic and occasionally grandiloquent tone it confers on customary objects of study. One could even add that, as commonplace as apocalyptic perspectives may be, the present moment allows us to glimpse, for the first time, what might be called a rational apocalypse: rather than simply making the world meaningful by comparing it to an imagined end, we also enhance our lucidity by accepting its predictable end. The shock that climate change elicits from much of the population and that Anthropocenic thinking manages to capture is so great that the geophysical whole that carries and sustains us is more and more frequently conceived in terms of its annihilation, pure and simple. Losing what climatologists call a “safe operating space”Footnote ⁷¹ would trigger a completely unpredictable, catastrophic, and therefore uncontrollable chain of events. But unbridled as it is, this hyperbolic interpretation of impending climate events provides an opening for a revitalized political theology, proclaiming a gloomy form of re-enchantment: man can no longer be the center of the universe, nature is once again becoming a force that transcends all attempts to control and master it, and human error—or even sin—motivates appeals to the divine.Footnote ⁷²

Though it is difficult to determine the extent to which this position is driven by romantic enthusiasm for absolutes or by speculative opportunism, it is important to consider seriously what this scholarship signifies in the realm of knowledge. Beyond the unanswerable factual question of the future harm caused by climate change, the apocalyptic reaction testifies to an implicit critique of the social sciences, which, to a considerable degree, perpetuates philosophy’s traditional suspicion of these disciplines. The abrupt increase in generality entailed by invoking the end of time and the idea that the world itself will vanish from under our feet leads to a disillusionment with empiricism. Indeed, what is the point of meticulously analyzing the details of coming social and political changes if the anticipated outcome is quite simply the obliteration of the conditions of physical existence—a traumatism that is nothing short of metaphysical? Is there not something pathetic, even blameworthy, in pursuing social science when the historical horizon is indistinguishable from an experiment in speculative thinking?Footnote ⁷³ This point of view, which has been more or less explicitly formulated by the return of climate catastrophism, harbors many paradoxes. On the one hand, it takes climate change seriously and seeks to rise to the level of the challenge it represents; on the other, the horizon or prospect of total catastrophe means renouncing ways of thinking and acting that made it possible to identify this social fact in the first place. Apocalyptic reasoning follows from observations that tend to immediately dismiss methodical and empirical approaches in order to conceive objects that are deliberately beyond the scope of historical rationality, such as a generic “humanity” or the end of time. Furthermore, this way of framing the problem suffers from the same narcissism as its detractors. Whereas those responsible for climate change are perceived as being incapable of adopting a point of view other than their own, apocalyptic reasoning conceives of the future of nature only from the human standpoint. The issue is less the end of the world as such than the end of the world as we have known and used it; nature, as an external reality, is indifferent to this fact. In the end, the most ordinary kind of selfishness and the heightened realism advocated by catastrophic discourse overlap. Moreover, the primary target of ecological thinkers is the discourse of disinhibition generated by the economic and political spheres, which tends to argue that one should enjoy oneself while there is still time, that the future poses no problem for the present, and that the necessary solutions will sooner or later be found. Metaphysical thinking, in which the only thing at stake is the world’s existence, simply inverts this discourse: crushing guilt can provoke a moral reaction analogous to consumeristic disinhibition, since it is already too late to do anything and nothing can be saved. Triumph and decline are, after all, two sides of the same coin.

Through this reactivation of eschatological mythologies and the contradictions that result from interpreting them literally, it is philosophy that has once again taken on these contemporary questions. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a tension persisted between a philosophical practice conceived as a purely intellectual experience, able to grasp things and values solely through conceptual analysis, and one in which thought and the world were conceived first and foremost as social and historical realities, making them dependent on the various forms of knowledge used to analyze these conditions. Although the reality is, of course, more nuanced, the climate question seems to have bolstered the former conception of philosophical activity, since it purports to be the only intellectual model commensurate with a catastrophe of metaphysical proportions. One could see this phenomenon simply as an accentuation of millenarianism’s last remnants in a context in which modern rationalism has exhausted itself, or observe that any serious social crisis (disease, famine, foreign invasion, and so on) resurrects basic ontological insecurities. But in the present context these factors are only secondary, and the mass adoption of apocalyptic thinking testifies above all to the difficulty of grasping the consequences of climate change in the discursive forms offered by the social sciences. Granted, the two terms of this syntagma—“social” and “science”—were closely tied to perceptions of the collective future that dominated the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries, and the pursuit of the sociological ideal certainly requires a deep revision of the terms and the ideas that constitute it. But this does not necessarily conflict with the project of a sociological and philosophical interpretation of massive environmental disturbances that refuses to be bound by sterile universalistic categories.

The Anthropocene does not mark the end of the social sciences, nor the end of the world. An epistemological and political page has turned, like others before it, and intellectual approaches are already measuring up to the challenges raised by this new era. In this way, the Anthropocene has emerged as an empirical and normative ground to be explored and an opportunity to provide the social sciences with a new language and reinvigorated theoretical goals.