Review Essay: The End of Environmental Political Theory As We Know It

• Author: Alyssa Battistoni
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221091554
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 243 –252

© The Author(s) 2022

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1. J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental

History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2015).

Book Review

Book Review

Abstract

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to

imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks

backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not

reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field

nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly

virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge

production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it,

reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to

late night conversations and confabulations.

The End of Environmental Political Theory As We Know It

John Dryzek, Rational Ecology: Environment and Political Economy. New York: Basil

Blackwell, 1987.

Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. Cambridge:

MIT Press, 2004.

Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Reviewed by: Alyssa Battistoni, Political Science, Barnard College, New York, NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221091554

Political Theory is almost precisely as old as the modern Western environ-

mental movement, coincident with the Age of Ecology. The half century since

the journal’s founding has witnessed the most extraordinary environmental

change in all of human history; indeed, nearly all of political theory in its guise

as an academic field has developed within the postwar period now known as

the Great Acceleration.1 For most of that enormously consequential fifty

1091554PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221091554Political TheoryBook Review

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