Seminars

Political Economy of Society and Nature

Year Founded 1971

Seminar # 523

StatusActive

This seminar was founded to study the most compelling questions of the day, which then related to the war in Southeast Asia, its causes, and consequences. Today the seminar continues to examine vital current issues from the perspective of critical and social theory with an emphasis on their economic, political, and philosophical dimensions and roots in political economic structures. It focuses particularly, though not exclusively, on the relationship between political economy and the transformation of the natural world, addressing pressing issues like climate change, the rights of nature, and resource extraction, while also attending to the ways that nature and society are represented in core concepts of political economy like scarcity, growth, and property.

Chair/s

Omar Dahbour

odahbour@hunter.cuny.edu

Alyssa Battistoni

abattist@barnard.edu

Rapporteur/s

Sara Wexler

sara.wexler@columbia.edu

External Website

Conference Registration

Meeting Schedule

Scheduled

14
Apr

April 14, 20266:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Barnard College

The Making of an Indebted Planet. An Ecological Critique of Capital Beyond the Limit

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Speaker/s

Andreas Folkers, Columbia University and The Institute for Social Research

Abstract

Ecological critics of capital usually argue that a finite planet is incompatible with infinite capitalist growth. But what happens to this critique once ecological limits and thresholds have been crossed without neither capitalism nor the world simply ending? The talk proposes a new ecological critique of capital beyond ecological finitude and capitalist infinitude; a critique that stresses the haunting, recurring, and indebting qualities of capital as a planetary force. It will argue that capital’s return is bound to return as ecological destruction. Global heating is the eternal return of capitalist return as collective ecological debt. With reference to projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere, the talk shows a) how in times of carbon overshoot what environmental economists call “natural capital” turns from asset into liability, and b) that carbon removal is not, as it is often cast, a return to the climatic status quo ante. Instead, it inaugurates an open-ended, potentially infinite project of planetary repair without redemption and return.

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Past Meetings

Scheduled

17
Feb

February 17, 20266:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Barnard College

Sovereignty Against the State: The Case for Ecosovereignty

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Speaker/s

Omar Dahbour, Hunter College and Graduate School, CUNY

Abstract

The principle of ecosovereignty that I advocate in my 2025 book of that title involves multiple justifications. In this talk, I focus on one of these—that it is the best current understanding of the concept of political sovereignty. 3 points are emphasized. 1st, sovereignty is not necessarily a concept that must be associated with absolute state authority, as in the influential early modern conception of Bodin and Hobbes. 2nd, sovereignty today, as a result of colonial liberation movements in the 20th century, is to be understood not as opposed to the principle of self-determination, but as an entailment of that principle. 3rd, self-determination itself must be rethought, after the “environmental turn” in political philosophy, as a principle justifying local and substate authority over environmental goods and services. These 3 points culminate in the principle of ecosovereignty, or so I will argue.

Scheduled

11
Nov

November 11, 20256:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Milstein 912

Barnard College

Whither Economic Rights?

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Speaker/s

Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

Abstract

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper will seek to explore a role for economic rights in the context of an analysis of capitalist political economy in the neoliberal period, while also trying to diagnose the relative lack of foundational philosophical discussion of such rights when compared to the centuries of profound attempts to lay foundations for the rights around liberty.

Scheduled

21
Oct

October 21, 20256:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Milstein 912

Barnard College

The New Great Game: How Deindustrializing Europe Powered India’s Carbon Takeoff

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Speaker/s

Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago

Abstract

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