"For the past decade no thinker has had a greater influence on debates about the meaning of
climate change in the humanities than the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Climate change he has
argued upends our ideas about history modernity and globalization and confronts humanists
with the kinds of universals that they have been long loath to consider. Here Chakrabarty
elaborates this thesis for the first time in book form and extends it in important ways. "The
human condition " Chakrabarty writes "has changed." The burden of "The Climate of History in a
Planetary Age" is to grapple with what this means for historical and political thought.
Chakrabarty argues that our times require us to see ourselves from two perspectives at once:
the planetary and the global. The global (and thus globalization) are human constructs but the
planetary Earth system de-centers the human. Chakrabarty explores the question of modern
freedoms in light of this globe planet distinction. He also considers why Marxist postcolonial
and other progressive scholarship has failed to account for the problems of human history that
anthropogenic climate change poses. The book concludes with a conversation between Chakrabarty
and the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. Few works are as likely to shape our understanding
of the human condition as we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene"--
