Book Review: Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211023870 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Author | Daniel Matthews |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
NIGEL CLARK AND BRONISLAW SZERSZYNSKI, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene
Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity, 2020, pp. 226, ISBN-13:978-1-5095-2635-2,
15.99 GBP (pbk).
Since the late 1980s climate scientists have developed increasingly detailed knowledge of
our planet’s deep past. The analysis of ice cores taken from glaciers and ice sheets has
revealed a history of radical geochemical transformation. These discoveries speak not
to the gradualism of 19th century geology (Lyell, 2018) but to an awareness that the
basic elements of the earth system can be reorganised through sudden disjunctions
(Lenton et al., 2008). As one geologist puts it, ‘the Earth seems to be less one planet,
rather a number of different Earths that have succeeded each other in time, each with
very different chemical, physical and biological states’(p. 6). In one of their many
conceptual innovations, Clark and Szerszynski refer to this fact of planetary self-
differentiation as planetary multiplicity. As they suggest, planets are ‘self-incompatible,
always out of step with themselves’(p. 172), charged with the latent capacity for radical
change in order to address the perennial problems produced by chemical disequilibrium
and the capture, cycling and distribution of energy.
Atmospheric CO2 pollution, interventions within the nitrogen and phosphorous
cycles, and the resulting acidification of the oceans (among other things), signal that
the earth system today may well be passing through ‘tipping points’(Lenton et al.,
2019), suggesting that a fundamental state shift within the planet is underway. In this
sense, planetary multiplicity has become a social, rather than merely geological,
matter of concern. This is the central insight of the Anthropocene thesis which claims
that human activities have shifted the earth system beyond the parameters associated
with the Holocene. If modern social and political thought tends to bifurcate and purify
the Natural and Social realms (Latour, 1993), the Anthropocene invites a theorisation
of associative life in which the social is enfolded within geological and ecological forces.
In their second conceptual innovation, Clark and Szerszynski suggest that the
Anthropocene forces us to understand social forms as earthly multitudes (pp. 52–54,
93–99). This concept is counterposed to modernist accounts in which social relations
are set against nature, whose rhythms and cycles are understood to be ‘outside of
society’(p. 7). An analysis of earthly multitudes involves attending to the ways in
which human social forms arise out of and act into the planet (pp. 46–54). Human com-
munities are always situated in relation to a particular network of inhuman forces, which
are ‘engaged with, experienced, known and imagined’(p. 9) in singular ways. Whether a
dependence on the phosphorous and nitrogen which facilitates contemporary intensive
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(2) 332–343
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211023870
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