In Climate Leviathan, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright speculate about the future “in a serious way,” drawing on a wide range of theory to sketch four possible governance scenarios, experimenting with scenarios as a genre for critical political thought. The authors assume that the governments and societies of the world will fail to mobilize fast enough to mitigate climate change, resulting in numerous and massive social, political economic, and cultural disruptions. They then analyze contemporary geopolitical trends in order to generate four different modes of governance that might take hold, at a global level, in order to respond and manage that state of affairs.
The scenario they deem most likely, which they call “Climate Leviathan,” imagines the rise of a global sovereignty that addresses and manages climate change through some form of liberal capitalism. The emergence of this sovereignty, however, is contingent on Climate Leviathan winning out over two antagonistic ideologies and governance forms. One, “Climate Behemoth,” is described as a reactionary and national-capitalistic resistance to the Leviathan’s global hegemony and appeal to rational governance. “Climate Mao,” by contrast, is an anti-capitalist but autocratic counter-hegemony. Finally, the authors also pose “Climate X,” named after Walter Benjamin’s Thesis X (in Theses on the Concept of History) depicted as an anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign alternative to the former three.
