Pensiero politico ecologista: storia e percorsi genealogici

Il volume si pone l’obiettivo di operare una ricostruzione una storia del pensiero politico ecologista. Il volume ospita i saggi dei segueti autori.

Alberto Laganà
Although rarely considered as a relevant chapter in the history of political ecology, Cornelius Castoriadis’s contribution to an ecological political thought of democracy stands out as a rather meaningful one. Starting from his social-historical research in the imaginary magma of Western modernity and his analysis of the political failures of radical social movements in the aftermath of May 1968, this paper seeks to explore Castoriadis’s political ecology as a manifold and multilayered contribution that is integral to his later political intervention on autonomy and the future of the democratic project. Facing the transformations of the social imaginary of late capitalism, the insertion of an ecological component is of paramount importance to a radical democratic political project as it contests the capitalist scheme of needs and core imaginary significations, pointing to an exigency of self-limitation and a new cultural creation of unprecedented magnitude.

Jacopo Bonasera
This essay takes into account the conceptual nexus between history, politics, and critique established by two major theorists of the Anthropocene: Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty. It is argued that despite important theoretical differences between their reflections, they both find the Anthropocene to have disruptive effects on human possibilities to comprehend and criticize history. On the one hand, for Latour the discovery of Gaia brings about a new geo-history which allows us to both ‘disinvent’ old historical categories, and favor the political composition of a new order. Chakrabarty, on the other hand, finds in the Anthropocene the key to a new ‘negative universal history’ that makes the ‘evolutionary’ history of the species crucial for a critical understanding of the present. Finally, the way Latour and Chakrabarty utilize the concepts of ‘class’ and ‘population’ is used to draw conclusions on their conceptualization of political ecology.

Carlo Marsonet
Richard Malcolm Weaver (1910-1963) has been a major figure in the American conservative movement of the XX century. Although he is almost exclusively remembered for his masterpiece, Ideas Have Consequences(1948), his political thought is much broader and more multifarious than that. In particular, this contribution aims to consider one particular aspect of his intellectual production, namely his ecological thought. Indeed, his conservative sensibility is pervaded by a pronounced respect for what called “nature”, rather than “environment”. In this regard, after a brief introduction of this “realist” conservative, the article examines the profound influence that the so-called “Southern Agrarians” exerted on him. It then considers Weaver’s critique towards the ideology of progress and the anthropological crisis resulting from modernity. Finally, it describes his ideas about conservatism as the stewardship of a human-scale order and emphasises the key concept of piety

Michele Garau
The article is focused on the theoretical contribution of Jacques Camatte and the review «Invariance», founded by him in the late 1960s. The aim of the analysis is to describe how Camatte’s path starts in the Marxist debate – specifically belonging to the political tendency related to Amadeo Bordiga’s thought – and gradually breaks with this field. The core of this breakdown is based on the concept of productive forces. Camatte shows that the Marxist concept of economic and technical development is not critical enough toward the capitalist vision of productive forces. Furthermore, he seeks to underli