What does it entail to study the climate crisis from – or consistently with – a critical realist perspective? The paper addresses this question in three steps. First, it considers the boundaries of critical realism in relation to climate crisis research. In this context it identifies climate science as a field that in important respects resonates implicitly with critical realism. Conversely, a book by human ecologist Andreas Malm is introduced as an example of a work that, while sympathetic to critical (...) realism, in key respects contradicts core features of it. Second, to illustrate what an analysis of the crisis informed by critical realism can look like, the paper brings into focus the main causes of the climate crisis – including the capitalist growth imperative, neoliberalism, and consumer culture. Finally, the status quo project, the green growth project and the degrowth project are identified as fundamentally different ways of approaching the climate crisis. (shrink)

The Political Economy of European Social Democracy Content Type Journal Article Category Review Pages 529-531 DOI 10.1558/jcr.v11i4.529 Authors Peter Nielsen, Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, P.O. Box 260, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 11 Journal Issue Volume 11, Number 4 / 2012.

Is the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri compatible with critical realism? In this article I argue that their book Empire is not, whereas Multitude is. Critical realists should be interested in this question because the passage from Empire to Multitude can be reconstructed as a case of critical realist underlabouring and, as such, exemplifies an openness to critique and changing political circumstances that critical realists prescribe for themselves but unfortunately tend in practice to ignore. Highlighting the concepts and (...) practice of underlabouring, of judgemental rationality and epistemological relativism, I argue that Hardt and Negri can also underlabour for critical realists, in that their work demonstrates the need for underlabouring to proceed in a non-philosophical as well as philosophical vein. Thus, striving for a new science and human emancipation in critical realism can assume a theoretically as well as an empirically informed content, and a historically situated commitment. (shrink)