Kommentar |
Social scientists and historians commonly describe the boom decades after the Second World War in Europe and the Western World as the “Trente Gloriseuses” (Jean Fourastié) or the “Golden Age” (Eric Hobsbawm). The rosy picture of rising affluence, social security, emancipation and liberalization has often served as a normative foil to criticize economic, social, and political developments since the 1970s. From an environmental perspective, however, the decades of the economic boom appear in a strikingly different light, namely as the Great Acceleration which propelled humanity into the Anthropocene (Paul J. Crutzen). In this seminar, we will examine the changes of institutions, infrastructures and life-styles that both cause climate change and make it difficult to limit it and tackle its consequences. In particular, we will focus on the emergence and spread of energy-intensive life-styles and (auto-)mobility. |
Literatur |
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London 1995.
John Robert McNeill, The Great Acceleration. An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 2016.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History. Four Theses, in: Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), H. 2, S. 197–222. |