The Eco-Republic
The Eco-Republic
The Republic in an Age of Social Ecology
I'd like to talk a little about 'Green Republicanism' as it has been developed in my own work since the 1990's.
My thoughts here are offered in response to the publication of this book, After the Anthropocene: Green Republicanism in a Post-Capitalist World, by Anne Fremaux. I have yet to read the book, but have a very good idea of its contents and its main argument. I have exchanged ideas and information with Anne on these themes since 2014, when she embarked upon her PhD. I am always cheered when scholars respond to certain things in my work, then proceed to develop them, add to them, and proceed to make their own original contribution. I have watched this work in its emergence and development. And now it has been brought to completion. It's a challenging piece of work and identifies an underdeveloped theme in environmental thought and practice, a theme which, in my view, is crucial in determining the success or failure of environmentalism in the 'real' world of politics in which we live. Too often, environmentalism speaks in the language of science and scientific facts. That, its adherents will claim, is its strength. I would agree, so long as we recognize the role of all human disciplines, arts, sciences, humanities. I disagree strongly with those who think that science can do the work of ethics and politics, and press scientific facts and truths upon the public realm. Such things do not override ethics and politics, and do not take priority over values, interests, concerns in any crude uni-linear sense. That is not how human society operates. In recovering Plato and ancient thought on this, I have been concerned to avoid erecting environmental philosopher kings over the heads of the people. I believe in an Eco-Republic which recovers the dignity of ethics and politics, not an environmental dictatorship in which science legislates truths to the public realm. Science is a good servant but a bad master – and it necessarily tends to be the case that the science which is offered as incontrovertible fact and non-negotiable reason is merely politics by another name, concealing any number of particular positions. I argue for the recovery of ethics and politics as key drivers of the change we seek to see.
I would encourage people to read and study this book and absorb its lessons at length, because its emphasis on the political and ethical dimensions of environmentalism is very much one that I agree with, supplying the missing link in the effective action we need to address the crises of modern civilization. There is a wealth of scientific knowledge and technological know-how available to us; the problem is a deficiency in the field of practical reason, involving a lack of a politics worthy of the name, a confusion with respect to ends, and a lack of social identity, appropriate character and modes of conduct. I would pay serious attention here to notions of ecological virtue and citizenship, to nurturing the springs of motivation and action as well as to socially structured patterns of behaviour within specific social relations. Character construction within specific modes of conduct determine whether we will respond to calls for action, whether these come in terms of scientific or moral appeal. Indeed, set within social relations, these things determine whether or not there is a 'we' to respond and take action in the first place.
All of these questions fall within the theme of 'republicanism.'
So I recommend this book on 'Green Republicanism' as the kind of thinking we need in order to ensure the ecological transformation of 'the political' the human world desperately needs.
Congratulations and well done to Anne Fremaux, not merely for getting her work published, but most especially for the bold and radical thinking contained in this work. It very much chimes with my own work over the years. Bringing politics and ethics back in in their unity, with economics considered as a branch of both, is essential if we are to translate the immense knowledge and know-how available to us into practical effect with respect to developing new mentalities and modalities.
“This book develops a novel approach to environmental crisis described within the framework of Green Republicanism, synthesizing knowledge across Earth Systems Sciences, philosophy, political theory, political economy, ecological economics, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies....”
That's pretty much the approach I have sought to develop in the “Being and Place” project, as detailed on this site. I've never quite been able to complete the original vision.
Anne has taken Republicanism seriously and adapted it to the demands of the Age of Ecology the human race ought to be entering. There's no guarantee that we will. I would argue that the Age of Ecology is necessary, desirable and, in the least, possible (I argue for potentiality in a stronger sense), but is contradicted by the system imperatives and constraints of the capital order that has removed us further and further from our biological and ecological matrix, from social ties and sources of belonging, indeed from sources of meaning. The future will be the Age of Ecology, if there is to be any 'we' in any future worth having.
I'll pay my own little tribute to Anne here. I've been following her progress from embarking upon PhD to publication since 2014, and had my own little involvement and input along the way, so I know the hard work and hard thought that has gone into this achievement. The same with other students and scholars I've enjoyed exchanging ideas with over the years. Achievement is a combination of ideas, inspiration, imagination, intellect, frustration and perspiration. My reward is to see things like this, not just the titles and publications, but the ideas being brought to fruition and the hope that enough people listen, read, absorb the lessons, take them into their changed practices, to be able to make a difference for the better.
These are ideas the world needs.
The congratulations are well deserved, but are the “showbiz” side of things that people see and respond to most. People don't see the years of hard slog, the seemingly endless reading, writing and rewriting day after day, month after month, year after year; the thought, the frustrations, the detours, all of the lonely hours that leads to the achievements and the plaudits. You have to have a high intelligence to do this, a high idealism to argue such a thesis, and be psychologically tough to be prepared to go it alone for a long stretch of time. That's a lot of commitment, and a lot of time out of one's life. So I say well done. I am full of admiration for the thinkers, scholars, and academics who are involved in generating, sustaining and delivering ideas, who put aside other possibilities in life to take up the pen and seek to make a contribution to the human betterment in this way. I once had someone shout at me to “stop thinking, it's time for action!” “Don't act, think!” was my provocative response, attempting to expose such demands as crude in setting things that are joined in antithetical relation. These things are not either/or choices. I concluded a series of talks I gave on philosophy in 2010 with the words: “as we think, so we shall live.” That's the case for philosophy, for ideas. (Philosophizing Through the Eye of the Mind: Philosophy as Ethos and Praxis).
Thinking is acting. And if you don't think right, you will not act right. But, of course, thought and action exist and flourish in an interactive relation, each continuously informing and enriching the other. There is a time to put the pen down. And there is a time to pick it up again. There is a bridge between contemplation and action.
On a personal note, I saw these ideas in their embryonic form in 2014, and have seen them develop, grow and come to fruition through powerful thinking sustained over time. It's a long hard process, and it is gratifying to see where the original ideas have led. One of the most rewarding things for me over the years of doing what I do - writing, publishing in free access, working with and exchanging ideas with research students and scholars as they develop their ideas - is to see the flow and expansion of thought, to see ideas take root, grow, take flight and bear fruit. In getting taken up by others, ideas changing modes of thought and, in due course, modes of action and organisation. That's how the world is changed for the better.
As to the ideas involved, I would look at Green Republicanism as an attempt to critically reappropriate ancient insights on politics as creative self-actualisation on a (post)modern terrain. There are a couple of books I would recommend along these lines, both by Melissa Lane:
Eco-Republic: Ancient Thinking for a Green Age
and
Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living
Rather than discuss these books, however, I shall elaborate on the themes of eco-republicanism that exist in my own work. This began in the 1990's as I developed Marx's critique of the atomistic bourgeois order as an attempt to recover the contours of an active citizen democracy in the modern world. I, too, took the argument for 'rational fredom' back to ancient Greece and Plato and Aristotle. It was a short step from there to developing an ecological concept of citizenship alongside the social concept. Having published my thesis on 'Rational Freedom' in 2001, I proceeded to develop the concept of Ecopolis, the ancient Republic envisaged as an Eco-Republic.
There is nothing 'idle' about such thinking, just as there is nothing practical about having all the tools in the world but little idea of the ends to which they are to be applied. I like ideas to have roots and fruits. If 'we' fail in face of the issues that confront 'us,' then we will fail for want of having constituted a genuine and effective 'we' and 'us' with respect to public life. Politically, there is no 'we,' and calls for climate action based upon scientific research will fail for this reason – such calls are addressed to a 'we' that does not exist. The lack of response is not evidence of greed, stupidity and indifference on the part of people, but of an institutional and systemic indifference to such concerns. The question, then, is one of establishing a Green Polity or Republic, setting economic activity and a viable economy within the social relations of a recovered and reconstituted public life. That has very much been my concern over the years. So I shall say a few words on this.
It is easy enough to demand “system change” in order to bring about the no-growth or degrowth economy; the hard part lies in setting this call within an institutional analysis that addresses the necessary operation of prevailing economic institutions, devises a strategy of how these may be uprooted, and establishes the contours of alternative forms of governance and economic provision. It is beholden upon those making demands for change to meet the alternative institutions requirement. I write at length on this in my introduction to Meszaros (2018) (I shall supply references and links at the bottom of this piece). There is a groundswell of climate activism in the world, something which has the potential to form into an active, informed citizen body giving content to a renewed public life. The problem at present, however, is that these demands are being made upon an untransformed political and economic sphere, rather than being developed in terms of an ecological transformation of the political sphere. And that won't work. Such demands point beyond existing institutions and relations, and cannot be properly articulated within them. There's no point lamenting institutional and psychological inertia and failure here, and no point bewailing the inadequacies of existing political leadership as well as the indifference of the greater public. Such a politics is merely a constant rehearsal of a defeat that is sure to come. Instead, there's every reason to understand the nature of the beast to be tamed or transformed. Practice allied to understanding will yield the realization that the beast cannot be tamed and cannot be other than it is and do other than it does. The idea that the expansionary imperatives of the capital economy can be constrained to the social and ecological good by an appropriate and effective legislative and regulative framework is the old reformist one, the same one that in the 1950s claimed that we no longer lived under capitalism since we now had a 'mixed economy.' The message is the same every time. It's the same message delivered at the end of the nineteenth century by Berstein: the system is being tamed, it is improving conditions for all, there is no need for radical change, problems can be addressed and resolved by piecemeal amelioration. In the present age, Philip Pettit has written well on the recovery of republican modes of thought and action in politics. But his position reads as the old reformism reinvigorating by republicanism. Against the socialists on the left who would kill the tiger and the economic libertarians on the right who would set it free, Pettit argues that we need to ride the tiger. The argument is that the capitalist economy basically delivers in terms of material quantities and just needs to be managed properly to social ends. There is nothing new about such thinking. This is is the old reformism, of which the Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney wrote: “you cannot skin a tiger claw by claw; vivisection is its trade and it does the skinning first.” Pettit is a fine political theorist and I would recommend reading his books. But his view lacks what it takes to constitute a genuine public realm. In an exploitative capital economy that divides society along class lines, there will be no 'we' to constitute the public realm. Further, the political realm will remain subject to the constraints of capital as a regime of accumulation. The reformist argument rests on the delusion that the state is determinant and is capable of regulating the private economy, whereas within capitalist relations it is determined and structurally incapable of governing for the common good.
I'm reminded of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, in which the scorpion asks the frog to carry him to the other side of the river. The scorpion reassures the somewhat sceptical frog that he won’t sting him, since to do so would be to ensure that the both of them drown. The reasoning seems logical, in that it tells a truth that all concerned parties could accept. So the frog lets the scorpion jump on his back and proceeds to swim across the river, only for the scorpion to turn and sting him after all. The action is completely irrational, since now they will both die. “Why did you do that?” asked the frog, shocked by such unreasonable, mutually destructive, behaviour. “Because I can't do otherwise,” replied the scorpion.
You can call it 'responsible' or 'caring' capitalism all you like, but the sine qua non of the system remains the accumulative imperative. “Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets.” is how Marx described the new moral law of the capital system. The capital system is defined by the constant expansion of monetary values. Once demands start to block and subvert mechanisms of accumulation and valorisation, the system will react, in terms of investment strikes, economic crises, and in terms of protests on the part of business groups, financial interests, political leaders, and members of the public whose livelihoods are at stake. There are vast processes of investment, employment, and income involved, and any challenges to these must, sooner or later, face the fundamentally political question of intervention, challenge, and alteration. At that point, 'rebellion' ceases to be a matter of pressure-group politics and civil disobedience but must become revolution. Or retreat and/or seek compromise on the basis of unaltered relations.
There is little point in making demands for effective action on a political realm that is institutionally ill-equipped to listen, respond, and act. We know government ought to be the agent of the universal good, but that ought-to-be is blocked by a structural incapacity on its part. Whatever the ideals of political philosophy claim, the state is not the agent of the long term common good but is the political command centre of the capital system and is charged with the task of ensuring unity in the context of a system which is defined as the competition of capitals. The capital system is a fundamentally anarchic system of production, and government exists to ensure a degree of unity so that the process of accumulation can be sustained. Government is thus bound up with the very system it is being charged to regulate or, even less likely, transform; it is both constrained by and facilitating the very accumulative imperatives that are destroying the physical, political, and ethical commons – because that's what a system which pursues exchange value to the neglect of use value does: it can do no other. Attempt to ride the scorpion, and it will bite you on the bum every time. In the absence of a genuine re/public, prepare to be bitten and prepare to drown. Logic is up against the prevailing illogic of the capital system as a regime of accumulation, and the immediate welfare of communities the world over is bound up with it.
That takes me into another issue of concern: the capital system as a subjectless and irresponsible system of alien control. This identifies a problem that is much more and much deeper than the physical institutions of capitalism. The institutions of capitalism are easy to identify, expropriate and nationalize/socialize, the logic and rule involved in the relations of the capital system much less so.
The capital system is not a public domain that is amenable to democratic will, (or to rational, moral or scientific appeal and persuasion at the level of facts and values for that matter), but a regime of private accumulation that operates in accordance within the constraints and imperatives of exchange value. The problem is that 'we' – who, what, where is this collective or republican political agency and identity? - are making demands on a public realm that does not exist. The political realm that does exist does not and cannot function as a genuine agency of the universal interest and good. Even warnings to the effect that failure to act will ensure common ruination are to no avail.
The solution is to constitute a public realm, in the context of a genuine public life, and to restore the common ground that has been annexed and winnowed away through the great disembedding of the capital system. This great disembedding refers to the severance of human beings from nourishing connections to the sources of life, meaning, and fulfilment: connections to others, social ties and bonds. The capitalist severance of exchange value from the realm of use values involves a whole series of separations: from the sources of identity, belonging, and meaning 'and from political, social, ethical, and ecological communities and goods. Separation is the key figure of the modern age. I examine this disembedding in all its aspects in my work on Marx from 2018, Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx.
I have written at length on the distinction between the capital system and capitalism, only to have it dismissed as 'academic' or merely 'theoretical.' Not so, and the failure to make the right distinctions here could very well bring about not the socialism intended but the top-down bureaucratic centralisation that is its very antithesis. So I shall labour and bore on on this one – see my Meszaros piece.
I will take the opportunity here to emphasise the “public” or republican quality of the socialism I advocate.
Socialism affirms the primacy of 'the political' – the things of the public and how we, the citizen body, come to govern our common affairs – over the economic – the things of private individual and sectional interest. The language of socialism is political – equality, democracy, justice, freedom; the language of capitalism is economic – efficiency, growth, production.
The “Republican” character of socialism is something I have been concerned to highlight and articulate since my own doctoral work, developing Marx's critique of the 'bourgeois' social order through the concepts of active, socialized, citizenship implying a fundamentally self-governing polity. The reasoning establishes the fundamental difference between 'capitalism' and 'socialism' as a difference between 'economics' and 'politics' in the context of their separation within the prevailing bourgeois or liberal order. Not only the theory but also the normative support structures of capitalism proceeds very much from within the discipline of economic 'science,' employing the methodology and speaking the language of economics. The defence of the 'free' market is offered in terms of efficiency; the optimization of the allocation of factors of production; the utility of individuals and its maximization, productivity; and so on. The language presumes the priority of economics over politics, a presumption you will find in the books written in defence of the capitalist system. There is a systematic devaluation and denigration of politics in these works and theories, taking the view that individual choice on the market is a more real, more democratic, expression of wants and needs than collective choices made within a necessarily abstract political realm. The public sphere, such as it is, is delimited and constrained as a legalistic neutral sphere that is agnostic on collective goods and the common good, leaving individuals free within law to choose their own goods as they see fit. These are the terms with which the justification of capital begins and in the main ends.
The problem is that the mere aggregate of choices on the part of discrete individuals does not and can never sum to constitute a genuine public realm forming a genuine public expression. That brings me to socialism. I pass by the criticism of capitalism and socialism as two sides of the same industrial coin as superficial, resting on the failure to make the necessary distinctions with respect to the capital system and the specific social form through which social labour is supplied. Rejections of 'industrialism' as such sound radical but are in fact the plainest reaction in leaving us with nowhere to go. Socialism as a future alternative to capital is ruled out as a species of the same thing, but the nature of any desired alternative is left vague and imprecise. What else is the degrowth economy but an attempt to subvert and supplant the accumulative logic and dynamic which defines the capital economy? That ambition has been central to socialism and its commitment to the direct supply of social labour through the associative producers (being careful to integrate distribution and consumption relations, to avoid domination of the producer interest). But confusion here, allied to past experience with top-down monological forms of political control, has led to scepticism with respect to socialism as an alternative. There is certainly no going back, for the reason that the problems we face are not chronological, they are structural. (see the Meszaros paper on this). Yearnings for a return to a more natural, pre-modern order are chimerical.
I therefore argue for socialism as the public philosophy that human beings as social beings require in order to live a fulfilled and flourishing existence. I openly make the case for socialism in terms of the primacy of the political, that is, of the political commons within which human beings associate together to determine the conditions upon which common affairs are governed. Such a view presumes that the separation and antithesis of politics and economics within capitalist modernity has been overcome, thus integrating individuality and sociality, private and public goods as complementary, rather than holding them against each other in antithetical relation.
The normative and democratic legitimation of socialism is thus sought within a discourse that is proper to politics. The socialization of production is sought to overcome exploitation and replace class division and conflict with an egalitarian social order. As against atomistic conceptions of self-assertion and self-maximisation in the 'bourgeois' order, socialism is based upon association proceeding from the civic space and embracing the system of needs and their satisfaction. Socialism affirms the unity of individuals as against their separation, establishing an active citizen democracy grounded in communal structures. These may be familiar locutions but they are frequently misidentified through the conflation of politics and economics. The socialist position advances explicitly political arguments concerning the proper constitution of the public realm. It is for that reason that I was concerned in my work to locate Marx in the ancient tradition of politics as the search for the best regime. It's a very Aristotelian concern, and I say so. I would recommend Scott Meikle's book Aristotle's Economic Thought here. Meikle went in search of an economic theory in Aristotle but, he says, couldn't find one – since for Aristotle, as for the ancients, economics was a branch of ethics. The same with politics. Until very recently, economics was not a science modelled on natural science but a 'political economy.' The modern capital system severed economics from ethics and politics, from the field of practical reason in which human beings as citizens and moral beings determine the terms by which they live together and govern their common affairs, and instead subjected the social realm to external laws and imperatives. At the heart of this is the abstraction of exchange value from the realm of use value.
I analyse this in great theoretical depth in Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism from 2018. Also in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration.
Capital is systematically deaf to warnings about the health and well-being of social and ecological goods. That is the end of a genuine public life. Logically, the frog and the scorpion share a common good in the conditions that preserve life. But the scorpion can do no other than it does, and will bite and sting with consequences that ensure common ruination.
I argue that there has always been a Republican dimension to socialism, and I have sought to develop this concern with 'things of the public' against the individualism, privatism, economism and economic determinism of the capitalist order.
I have developed this Republican dimension to produce a concept of the Ecopolis. I am, therefore, very interested in ideas of Green Republicanism, particularly the one advanced by Anne Fremaux in this book. The view I seek to develop is one that brings ethics, politics, and economics back into unity.
In making demands against existing political institutions, demanding a new legislative and regulative framework that embodies and articulates the common (socio-ecological) good, the presumption is the existence of a public realm that is capable of responding to and acting upon these demands. These demands will be confronted by the limits of the political sphere within the constraints of the systemic imperatives of a global capital economy. A “post-capitalist” economy and society implies a new public realm.
There will be a polity and form of governance in any future society, and an economy and a system of needs and their satisfaction as well. In demanding change, real change as distinct from mere reforms that preserve existing relations intact, (as distinct from even a design reformism from below that proceeds in the mistaken belief that there is a workaround that allows questions of power and structures of inequality to be evaded), there is a need to address the political and structural questions implied in dismantling the infrastructure of the growth economy and, importantly, in establishing alternative institutions that are viable, legitimate in terms of commanding the widespread support of citizens, and which do not suffer from the same ills of the system to be replaced. I don't know if nature really abhors a vacuum, but I do know that politics certainly does, and that any gaps opened up by wishful-thinking in place of hard institutional analysis tend to get filled by unrepresentative bureaucracies ruling over the heads of the people. Max Weber wrote that Marx's “dictatorship of the proletariat” would most likely be realized as the “dictatorship of the officials” over the proletariat. I think that Weber's criticism applied within untransformed institutions and relations – Weber thought modern bureaucratic organisation to be 'untranscendable. I think that Weber's criticisms can be met. I also think that they need to be met. This has nothing to do with vindicating Marx and everything to do with establishing the conditions of a viable socialism in institutional, structural, and democratic terms.
Those who have succeeded in institutionalising their power don't care for such transformations, and all the reason in the world with respect to common solutions that benefit all will not persuade them on this. Precisely because, in a system of alien control based on the rule of external economic imperatives, there is no common ground joining each and all. All lose when the system fails, but the problem here is the lack of a social identity that binds each and all together with respect to the long term common good. Thomas Hobbes told the truth about the bourgeois order long ago: in this order there is a constant expansion of power in which one either accumulates or gets accumulated. In the short run, there is no common good, only immediate self- and sectional interest, and in prevailing competitive conditions it pays some to take the decisions they do to gain an advantage over others as rivals in the competition for scarce resources. Those decisions will be taken even if the consequences accumulate to the common ruination of all, and in spite of warnings that such ruination is certain to follow. Appeals to common solutions and common goods in these circumstances fail for want of a social identity in which immediate individual and sectional interest and long term common interest coincide. Constituting such an identity is a central aspect of the politics of republicanism I set out. I set the argument here in light of the exhaustion of the old liberal/libertarian versus communitarianism debate. I said two decades ago that, with the exception of the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, the problem is that the principal communitarians in this debate are basically liberals and hence part of the prevailing arrangements they criticise. I'd say the same, too, of Philip Pettit now. And we are still stuck here. It's a dead-end. The most significant movement I am seeing on this is coming from conservative critics of liberalism like Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed. It's a challenging book that repudiates the libertarianism of the right – the free market, free trade liberals – and the libertarianism of the left – an ethical and cultural relativism allied to top down statist legalist politics.
The problem is not the inherently totalitarian character of community and notions of the common good as things that are necessarily repressive of individuality, otherness, and difference, but the unavailability of common forms in other than abstract terms within existing relations, terms which cannot but be felt as inimical to individual liberty. It is in this sense that I have argued for a republican turn in politics, something that goes beyond the libertarian vs communitarian debate as sterile and exhausted in being based on a liberal ontology that falsely separates individuality and society.
I strongly argue for republican dimension of an emancipatory politics. We are in need of an effective politics if we are to address the myriad crises that beset us. These crises are 'global' in nature and scope, and require concerted action within a comprehensive framework for their resolution. In arguing this, I also emphasize that the necessary large scale projects for common action will nevertheless fail unless they are grounded at the same time in small-scale practical reasoning, relations of social proximity, clusters of cooperators which network outwards, and oikophilia – love of home and place. Such things cultivate the character traits that are constitutive of a genuine public life, a polity that is more than laws, institutions and constitutions but involves culture, spirit, a way of life, habits of the heart. This is to establish the conditions of a character forming culture within particular modes of conduct.
A Green Polity or Republic is something qualitatively different from pressing green demands upon and promoting green demands within the prevailing political sphere, although, conceived as process of transition, such a thing emerge from within this associational space of eco-citizen activism. Constituting a genuine Eco-Public or Ecopolis involves something more than mobilising forces within the associational space of civil society merely to check and bring pressure to bear on existing government, but involves building and expanding a citizen movement that is given permanent form through material counter-organisations that are capable of reconstituting government as an effective pool of sovereign power.
Hence my own interest in Plato over the years stems from a concern to recover the 'things of the public' from all those sectional interests and extraneous imperatives that have hollowed the public out and removed the common ground from under our feet. I thus argue for a 'Green Republicanism' as part of my argument for an eco-socialism that recovers the ancient sense of politics as creative human self-actualization. This identifies politics as something much more than, indeed something quite the opposite of, the current zero-sum game of winners and losers which William Morris more than a century ago rejected as the politics of the “ins and outs.” Politics is more than this.
Politics in the ancient sense concerns creative human self-actualisation within a public life. The origin of the word politics is the Greek polites, which refers to those who are concerned with public life and public affairs; the antonym is idiotes, which refers to those interested only in private matters, those issues of concern only to the individual. There is nothing wrong with these private matters in themselves, only that to be concerned with such things alone is an incomplete freedom. I prefer the term “happiness” as “flourishing” (eudaimonia) but will go with “freedom” to embrace the modern principle and achievement of subjectivity). But my view is most adequately expressed as a public happiness, a public life which establishes the conditions of human flourishing. For completion, human beings, as social beings, require a public life worthy of the name (I need to check the Greek here, it's either politikon bion or bion politikon).
The Republic in view here is based on the recovery not only of the physical commons but also the ethical and political commons: a Green transformation of “the political” to deliver a public realm that is worthy of the name.
When it comes to converging contemporary crises, we, the citizen body, need to bridge the transition between theoretical reason and practical reason, and take our knowledge of the external world (science, facts, and I'd throw in technological know-how here, too) into the field of practical reason in order to motivate and mobilize a mass constituency and make a difference in changing the world. The field of practical reason is the world of ethics and politics, of values and motivations, as well as social identities and interests. I also consider economics as a branch of ethics and politics. Knowledge and know-how give us only the capacity to act, they do not make human beings want to act; that question of will or appetite or desire comes from elsewhere.
It is in that context that I would pay close attention to notions of ecological virtue and citizenship, identifying the virtues here as qualities for successful living/flourishing, proceeding from here to establish the contours of a Green Republicanism that is something much more than, and much better than, for instance, the currently influential work of Philip Pettit.
The conventional political sphere is increasingly detached from ethical, social and planetary realities and the stresses are becoming apparent. The emergent populisms, nationalisms and fundamentalisms are collective reactions against the manifest failures of liberal atomism, and serve as surrogate communities for want of the real thing. Such things highlight the fact that we are deficient in public life. We are thus tasked with the challenge of reconstituting public life. That involves much more than choosing which side to take and shout for in politics, but links various political allegiances and loyalties to the most important task of all, which is that of restoring the conditions of doing politics right. The solution to bad politics is not no politics but good politics. Politics in the true sense of the word.
That's a lot of words from me. I'm getting back to work after a horrible block for reasons of stress and health. I need to ration my time a bit more. I shall end here with various pieces of work I have written over the years which analyse the themes adumbrated above in depth and at length.
And something that develops the notion of an Urban Public,
Part 7 of this is entitled The Ecological Concept of the City
Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of rational principles of scale and justice. (The notion of 'reason' here is established in the previous sections). This part shows that a genuine rationalisation is characterised by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice, facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community. Recreating the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture ensures that reason no longer takes irrational (anti-human and anti-ecological) forms as at present.
Part seven looks at ecology and the public sphere, then.
And this introduction to the thought of Istvan Meszaros from last year is pertinent on the distinction between the 'capital system' and 'capitalism.' Meszaros was a mentor in the 1990's when I was in doctoral research and I had the opportunity to visit and stay with him at Sussex and develop my ideas in the process. I remained in Manchester, determined to keep expenses to a minimum in order to extend the period of research (and buy more books). He's an important thinker, though, when it comes to the socio-economic drivers behind the ecological crisis.
And seeing as geoengineering solutions in the context of ecological modernisation are being pushed again, as a last mad gamble born of desperation, I'll add this one which damns men as gods gambling with Gaia to the Hades they will surely make of this good Earth.
Excuse the wealth of texts, which will take a lifetime to read, time we don't really have. But this is my activism, and I'm happy enough to know that over the years working in free access on Academia and the Humanities Commons that students, scholars, academics have read them and are still reading them and making contact.
Here's my page on the Humanities Commons.
I can't and don't respond to people to anything like the extent I used to and still feel guilty in having to decline involvement and exchange. But there it is, time, and imperatives of health, have finally caught up with me on this. But not overtaken. I just have to spread my immense self a little more thinly these days.
The reward for me over the years has been in the reading and the writing, in seeing ideas spread and grow in being taken up and developed further by others in an endlessly expanding stream. A republic of letters, if you like.
I am still getting messages from my other sites. I shall share a few snippets from this past week from people all over the world, words that cheer me up immensely:
“I am fascinated by the way you analyse these topics"
says one
“I can't believe how much you write, and so interesting...”
says another.
And others
“I am very interested in the interconnections your work elaborates. I look forward to reading your work. Thanks for making it available.”
And this on Pythagoras:
“I am reading your paper because I'm working on a book on art and science. Major advances in science are made when seemingly disparate phenomena (e.g., electricity and magnetism) are unified. Pythagoras proposed a grand unification, between sound and the "spheres," positing that mathematical harmony applied everywhere Make sense?”
The things I get asked … I'd love to answer, but can't get drawn in any more.
From someone at The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries – this guy gets it:
“I was delighted to read your paper 'Plato and Rational Freedom', for I am, as you can guess from the titles of my books, an adversary of the tradition that 'conceives any collective purpose as an infringement upon liberty'. The dominance of this tradition in recent decades has had disastrous consequences: neglect of public services, tolerance of destructive "free trade" and excessive automation, refusal to tackle exorbitant inequalities in the distribution of income and capital . . . Moreover, the libertarian economists propound an amoral conception of freedom; as Milton Friedman wrote, 'freedom has nothing to say about what an individual does with his freedom'. One of my favourite comments on freedom is Aristotle's remark that 'men should not think it slavery to live πρóς την πολιτείαν', which might perhaps be translated as 'according to the way of life of a good citizen'. The Roman Catholic catechism states that 'there is no true freedom except in the pursuit of that which is good and just'.
It seems that the increasingly urgent need, to act decisively against malpractices that are destroying our environment and climate, will force us to abandon libertarian policies, since there is little or no chance that free markets will impose the necessary changes before it is too late.
I look forward to reading more of your work.”
And from a student:
“I'm currently writing a paper on whether the climate change and the current threat of environment renders Marxist ideas obsolete.”
No, it doesn't, the very opposite in fact: the environmental crisis makes it all the more important to understand Marx as a metabolic thinker who analyses the socio-economic causes of crisis. I wrote a lengthy reply to this effect. I also supplied a work I wrote last year arguing this very point:
And more. In a week. If something suggests itself to me immediately, I will respond. But I really can't engage like I used to. It's been fun and I think together we moved things on a little bit. But it's good to know that people are still reading:
“your ideas will have great implications in left politics if they are disseminated properly.”
I wonder if this guy meant I am not doing it properly.
I carry on. I can't do it any other way.
I shall end of that cheery note. I have so much work that I need to finish, and time and money are always getting tighter.
‘Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.’
Goethe