Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego.
Br J Sociol. 2013 Mar;64(1):99-122. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12008.
Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate-change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation-state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.
安东尼·吉登斯的《气候变化的政治学》代表了他在处理生态政治方面的重大转变。在这本书中，他否定了环境保护主义的相关性，并将气候变化政策与生命政治区分开来。吉登斯以简单而非反思性现代化的技术统治模式来应对气候变化。然而，吉登斯早期的社会学理论为更具反思性地理解气候变化提供了基础。气候变化体现了在高度现代性中，人与自然关系的存在性矛盾以新的形式回归，表现在生命政治中，并与资本主义国家的结构性矛盾交织在一起。存在性矛盾和结构性矛盾的相互关联体现在生命政治和资本主义民族国家之间的紧张关系中。这种紧张关系是理解迄今为止应对气候变化的政策反应失败的关键。
