Politics beyond Persons

Abstract

Contesting the assumptions that orient political life has been the business of political theory at least since Socrates. Countless dogmas have been disabled over the years by the prick of the philosopher’s pen—and by the public critique and political action it inspired. Today the vanguard of the field is challenging what is perhaps the oldest, deepest, and most entrenched dogma of all: the idea that political standing applies exclusively to persons, and that humanity’s unrestrained exercise of power over the natural world is perfectly legitimate. Environmental political theory has been contesting these assumptions for some time, and our contemporary ecological problems, from climate change to superbugs to resource depletion, are now forcing the field as a whole to take notice.1 To challenge the human exploitation of nature is not only to disrupt the boundaries of our political communities and the structure of our political institutions but to problematize virtually every aspect of life in modern society. What we eat and wear and do for work, what we buy and sell and build, where we live and travel and are buried – everything about our lives today depends on the rapacious instrumentalization of the earth. The assumption that the earth is for us, and hence that we have a legitimate title to exercise unlimited power over it, is so pervasive as to be invisible. It is constitutive of our political life, and it structures all the things we do within our political communities, but we never think about it. Our dogmatic slumber has been deep and relatively untroubled in this regard. Yet the assumption rests on beliefs that have been evacuated of authority, some for a long time. The first is