Andrew Dobson

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - with which we have been bequeathed. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these duties are owed non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little.

In recent years the engagement between the environmental 'agenda' and mainstream political theory has become increasingly widespread and profound. Each has affected the other in palpable and important ways, and it makes increasingly less sense for political theorists in either camp to ignore what the other is doing. This book draws together the threads of this interconnecting enquiry in order to assess its status and meaning. Dobson and Eckersley, two renowned scholars in this field, have commissioned an internationally recognised group of political theory scholars to think through the challenge that political ecology presents to political theory. Looking at fourteen familiar political ideologies and concepts such as liberalism, conservatism, justice, and democracy, the contributors question how they are re-shaped, distorted or transformed from an environmental perspective. Lively, accessible and authoritative, this book will appeal to professional scholars and students alike.

En este artículo se abordan dos cuestiones diferentes, aunque interconectadas. La primera es: ¿puede articularse una política de la ecología en términos de ciudadanía? Mi respuesta a esta pregunta es afirmativa, presentando una propuesta de «ciudadanía ecológica». Esto conduce a la segunda cuestión: ¿cómo afecta la ciudadanía ecológica a la noción misma de ciudadanía? Esta cuestión se responde mediante la articulación de una «arquitectura » de la teoría de la ciudadanía que se organiza a través de las oposiciones entre derechos y deberes, la esfera pública y la privada, la ciudadanía activa y la pasiva y, por último, entre las concepciones «territorializadas » y «desterritorializadas» de la ciudadanía. Se defiende que la noción de ciudadanía ecológica desestabiliza la arquitectura estándar de la ciudadanía al poner el énfasis en los deberes de los ciudadanos más que en los derechos; al sugerir que el ámbito privado es un espacio tan legítimo para la actividad ciudadana como el espacio público, al negar la asociación habitual entre la ciudadanía «pasiva» y el ámbito privado, y al revalidar las concepciones desterritorializadas de ciudadanía. Finalmente, se presenta la contribución de la ciudadanía ecológica a la «remoralización» de la política, y se trazan algunas de las tensiones resultantes de su confrontación con las exigencias de la democracia liberal

When God gave humankind dominion over the earth he may not have known exactly what we would be able to do with it. The technical capacities to which the production and reproduction of our everyday life have given rise have grown at an astonishing and, it seems, ever-increasing rate. The instruments that we use to do work on the world have become sharper and more refined, and the implications of human interventions in the nonhuman environment are much more far-reaching than could have been imagined even forty years ago. It has become something of a cliche to say that our technical abilities have outstripped the wisdom to know when, where, and how we should appropriately use them, but techniques such as genetic engineering invite the dusting-off of the cliche and the asking of the question implicit in it: We know we can splice genes, but should we splice them? We might of course come to the conclusion that we should only splice some of them some of the time, but even arriving at that conclusion presupposes that the ethical question has been asked and answered

This paper takes as a starting point William Ophul's claim that the last 450 years amount to an 'era of exception' in terms of resource availability. Ophuls suggests that it is no accident that this exceptional era of abundance coincides with the birth and development of liberalism - that liberalism, in other words, would not/could not have occurred without the conditions provided by this era of exception. Some of the ways in which this suggestion might be critically examined are discussed, and attention is drawn to one of its more interesting implications: if liberalism depends on abundance, what kind of political theory do we need if we are entering a new era of scarcity ('peak oil/peak everything')?

This highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition, having been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas which have grown in importance since the third edition was published. Andrew Dobson describes and assesses the political ideology of ‘ecologism’, and compares this radical view of remedies for the environmental crisis with the ‘environmentalism’ of mainstream politics. He examines the relationship between ecologism and other political ideologies, the philosophical basis of ecological thinking, the potential shape of a sustainable society, and the means at hand for achieving it. New to this edition: analysis of an intellectual and political 'anti-environment' backlash an account of sustainability in ecological thought the effect of globalization on ecologism ecological citizenship expanded bibliography. Green Political Thought remains the starting point for all students,academics and activists who want an introduction to green political theory.

This book provides a general survey of the life and work of the Spanish philosopher and essayist Ortega y Gasset, author of the widely read The Revolt of the Masses. Dr Dobson divides his study into sections devoted to Ortega's political thinking and to his philosophy, rooting these in the context of contemporary Spain and discussing the wider implications of their influence. He examines Ortega's position with regard to the Civil War, his ambivalent espousal of socialism, his emphasis on the importance of the select individual in the modernisation of society and creation of a nació vital; the appropriation of his ideas by Primo de Rivera in the cause of fascism. This book is intended to be accessible to both Hispanists and general readers with an interest in literature, history, intellectual and political thought and philosophy.

Andrew Dobson charts Sartre's transformation from novelist and apolitical philosopher of existentialism, before the Second World War, to a committed defender of Marxism and Marxist method after it. Examining Sartre's post-war work in detail, he shows how the biographies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, often considered tangential to his main oeuvres, are in fact central to this defence of Marxism, and should therefore be read as acts of political commitment. Andrew Dobson's study of posthumous sources, including the extended commentaries in English of Volume II of the Critique of dialectical reason, and in its insistence on reading Sartre's philosophical development as primarily politically motivated. It provides a clear reading of some of Sartre's less familiar works, situating them in an overarching social and political project.

I consider the contribution that a biocentric perspective might make to the ethical debate concerning the practice of genetic engineering. I claim that genetic engineering itself raises novel ethical questions, and particularly so when confronted with biocentric sensibilities. I outline the nature of these questions and describe the biocentric basis for them. I suggest that fundamentalist opposition to projects of genetic engineering is unhelpful, but that biocentric claims should now be a feature of ethical consideration. I conclude, though, that while environmental ethicists can contribute powerfully to debates concerning the future of genetic engineering, the ultimate direction it takes is likely to be beyond their control.

This paper addresses the leitmotif of Alan Holland's work, which is argued here to be a defence of the existence and worth of nonhuman nature. Definitions of politics have always depended on the idea of nature as a contrasting non-political realm, usually turning on the centrality of speech. Referencing the work of Aristotle, Kant and Bentham, I suggest that the instability of the distinction between the human and the nonhuman means that politics, as 'thing and activity', must itself be unstable. The question of whether there can be a politics without nature is explored through an analysis of the work of Latour, and the conclusion is reached that listening may well be just as important as speaking.