Our Planetary Condition

An actionable framework for doing politics with Earth’s nonliving, living, and technological agencies to expand planetary habitability.

Our Planetary Condition advances a simple yet transformative claim: We do not live on but are part of a planet whose nonliving, living, and technological forces actively shape politics. If keeping the Earth habitable is the defining challenge of our time, then politics must be restructured beyond human-centered and state-bound frameworks. Earth is not merely a system to manage but an agential complex to govern with. Authors Frederic Hanusch, Liza Bauer, Clemens Finkelstein, and Claus Leggewie propose a new approach for planetary politics—one that recognizes the collective agencies of nonliving, living, and technological actors as integral to our coexistence.

Rather than relying on human proxies to represent more-than-human concerns, the book shows how to do politics with planetary agencies—rivers and forests, cyclones and currents, even space weather—that actively shape political conditions. Across seven chapters, the authors unsettle inherited ideas of political subjectivity and representation, outlining a conceptual and practical framework for engaging these agencies that operate outside conventional registers of deliberation.

Merging political theory and the environmental humanities with research on planetary dynamics, ecological relations, and technological infrastructures alongside Indigenous and non-Western knowledges, this book introduces an actionable model for rethinking politics for the planetary age.

Frederic Hanusch is Professor of Planetary Change and Politics and Director of the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University Giessen. His books include The Politics of Deep Time and Democracy and Climate Change.

Liza B. Bauer is a cultural and literary scholar with a focus on the sociocultural and political reconfiguration of human-animal relationships. She is the author of Livestock and Literature and functions as co-head of Justus Liebig University’s interdisciplinary research section on human-animal studies.

Clemens Finkelstein is a historian and theorist of built environments at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he leads the Laboratories of Dis:connectivity research program.

Claus Leggewie is former Ludwig Börne Professor at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, where he also directed and cofounded the Panel on Planetary Thinking. He is the author of numerous works exploring the relationship between nature and culture, covering topics from climate politics to the Anthropocene and multispecies democracy.