Mathias Thaler

Professor of Political Theory, University of Edinburgh

Author: Mathias Thaler

  • New Review of Naming Violence

    Eric Ross (University of Massachusetts Amherst) has just published a generous review of book Naming Violence (2018).

    Here is an excerpt from the insightful text:

    “In Naming Violence, Mathias Thaler presents a compelling and novel framework to further understand the interdependence between language and our collective conceptualization of political violence. Thaler’s primary intervention is that the imagination is a potent albeit overlooked tool to assess, interpret, and mitigate violence. He convincingly supports the call to center imaginative processes in political theory through a series of creative and instructive case studies on genocide and storytelling, torture and hypotheticals, and terrorism and genealogy.”

  • Call for Papers: Utopia and Failure (II) – Newcastle, September 10-11, 2024

    Check out the CfP for the second event of our AHRC Networking grant:

    https://failingbetter.sps.ed.ac.uk/workshops/second-workshop-in-newcastle

    The deadline for applying is December 5, 2023.

  • New Paper

    A new paper of mine has just been published (online first) in New Political Science.

    The full bibliographic information is here: Thaler, Mathias “Utopia, Breakdown, Repair: Failure and Success in Social Dreaming.” New Political Science, 2023 (online first), 1–17.

    Abstract: A common charge against utopianism is that any attempt to create blueprints for a better future disregards a basic fact: humans’ proclivity for failure. In response, defenders of social dreaming have argued that failure can become generative, once we abandon the perfectionism that ostensibly inheres in utopian visions. Building on this revaluation, the paper applies a crucial lesson from engineering and design studies—that often artificial failure modes are required to enhance the safety of tools and machines. To flesh out this point, I turn to utopian fiction and discuss Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital-trilogy, which rejects techno-optimism about our climate-changed world, yet hails the transformative potential of an anti-capitalist scientific community. Ultimately, the paper claims that, if we cannot have success in addressing the climate emergency without committing serious mistakes, then one (but clearly not the only) path forward is to imaginatively prefigure the faultlines along which ecomodernist dreams for a “good Anthropocene” might rupture.

    A pre-print is here.

  • New review of No Other Planet

    Benjamin L. McKean (Ohio State University) has just published a thoughtful and generous review of No Other Planet in Contemporary Political Theory.

    An excerpt can be found here:

    “As this overview suggests, No Other Planet covers an enormous amount of ground, drawing from an admirably wide range of texts and showing an impressive mastery of multiple literatures. This fits the book’s focus on the education of desire, since there are so many channels through which desire might be educated. It’s also an important way of decentering traditional approaches to political theory, showing that other ways of engaging with politics may illuminate our present circumstances better than the familiar tools of abstraction and generalization. In that way, the book is an exemplar of problem-driven interdisciplinarity and a model of how theorists can and should make use of cultural resources to understand our world.”

    The full review, including insightful criticisms, is here:

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-023-00644-2

  • New review of No Other Planet in Global Policy

    Ruth Houghton (Newcastle) wrote a generous and insightful review of my new book for Global Policy. Here is an excerpt:

    “The book is an excellent example of cross-disciplinary work, bringing together political philosophy, insights from literary studies, and environmental humanities. In that respect, No Other Planet is an important work for scholars working across utopian studies as well as scholars working more broadly on utopian-thought in political philosophy and environmental humanities. Thaler’s theories of utopian fault lines open a productive line of enquiry with the potential for studies to investigate the other fault lines that underpin utopian literature.”

    The link to the entire review can be found here:
    https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/29/06/2023/book-review-no-other-planet-utopian-visions-climate-changed-world#_edn2

  • Call for Papers – Utopia and Failure – Workshop in Edinburgh (Spring 2024)


    This is a Call for Papers for a workshop I am co-organizing in Edinburgh in May 2024, together with Professor Davina Cooper (KCL) and Dr Ruth Houghton (Newcastle). The workshop will be part of a larger AHRC Networking Grant on utopia and failure, starting in late 2023.

    The AHRC announcement is here:

    https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX009122%2F1#/tabOverview

    With the available funding, we want to convene three in-person workshops, one in Edinburgh (May 2024), one in Newcastle (September 2024) and one in London (November 2024). The first of these events will revolve around the idea that utopias can offer shelter from wider societal failures. Our second workshop will explore the many ways in which utopias incorporate failures creatively into their set-ups. Our final event will try to draw prior themes together and consider future plans and publications.

    Below is some basic information on the Edinburgh event. The longer project description, covering all three workshops, can be found here:

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/lmkfgs7vjsl1nxi/Call%20for%20Papers%20-%20AHRC%20Networking%20-%20Edinburgh%202024.pdf?dl=0

    Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia

    In this workshop we seek to explore, positively and critically, the take-up and potential of utopian experiments to counter wider societal failings and experiences of failure. Our discussion will address how utopian fiction, design initiatives, community spaces, and the mobilisation of utopian desires and hopes, across different temporalities, get created and inhabited in response to wider oppressive social practices, including the competitive practices of mainstream societies, with their success/failure dyads. Utopia can seem to counter failure in several distinct ways. One turn to utopia is as shelter, escape, and comfort from the failings and failures that wider societies produce. Another takes up utopia within mainstream life as a radical ambition and ethos, rejecting notions of withdrawal and boundedness that escaping to utopia sometimes suggests. A third approach rejects the divisions between these two moves and foregrounds, instead, their interconnections.By exploring these and other relationships between failure and utopia, where utopia is framed as an antidote to failure, the workshop will explore several questions. These include: How do utopian projects respond to experiences of failure outside or beyond utopia? What counter-practices and ethoi do utopias offer (for instance, the emphasis on collaboration and cooperation rather than competition)? Can utopias’ alternatives be imagined and enacted in ways that undo wider cultures of failure? What can storytelling, both historical and contemporary, tell us about the desire to escape from social and interpersonal failure? These and related questions will guide the discussion during our first event.  

    Format

    The workshop will take place in May 2024 over one and a half days at the University of Edinburgh. Presenters will be asked to share a paper of around 6,000 to 8,000 words with all the participants, at least two weeks ahead of the event. The workshop will include a roundtable to introduce the network’s objectives, presentations (and discussions) of papers, breakout sessions to examine whether utopias can offer escape and shelter from a society that produces individual and collective failure, and a final session drawing shared themes together and previewing the following two workshops.

    Submission

    If you would like to give a paper at our first event, please include an abstract on the application form (maximum 500 words):

    https://forms.office.com/e/pY8Fg20E5L

    The deadline for applications is September 5, 2023.

  • Memory Studies paper now Open Access

    My new paper (co-authored with Mihaela Mihai) is now available Open Access (online first) in Memory Studies.You can download it from here:

    https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231176037

    Here is the abstract:

    Addressing the political implications of the ever-accumulating destruction of ecosystems and more-than-human life, this paper asks whether and in what ways environmental losses should be publicly commemorated. Our answer is two-pronged. First, we hold that a politics of environmental commemoration would enfranchise those who are already grieving, by lending legitimacy to their experiences. Moreover, commemorative practices might prompt much-needed norm change by nurturing a recognition of our species’ entanglement with the more-than-human world. Second, we programmatically introduce five principles that should guide environmental commemoration, ethically and pragmatically: multispecies justice, responsibility, pluralism, dynamism, and anticlosure. A critical examination of two real-world examples – the memorialization of the passenger pigeon’s extinction and the annual ritual of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – substantiates our theoretical argument. Finally, the paper engages with several potential criticisms.

  • Review of No Other Planet in Environmental Politics

    Joe P. L. Davidson (Warwick) has just published a generous and insightful review of No Other Planet in Environmental Politics. Here is an excerpt:

    “Thaler’s innovative methodological framework and judiciously analysed examples effectively and powerfully demonstrate the value of thinking speculative fiction, political theory, and climate change together. The study, with this constellation of elements, sets out a research agenda that will no doubt spur other green political theorists to explore the world of speculative fiction. Given the political disruptions associated with the climate crisis, new ways of thinking are required – and the dreams of climate fiction writers, whether weird or wonderful, hopeful or apocalyptic, are an invaluable resource.”

    The full review can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2023.2213135

  • Another podcast episode

    Jeffrey Church just had me on his consistently excellent Political Theory podcast. The new episode on No Other Planet can be found here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/thepoliticaltheoryreview/episodes/2023-05-16T09_27_38-07_00

  • New paper in APSR

    My new paper “Eco-miserabilism and Radical Hope” has just been published (online first) in the American Political Science Review. A link to the Open Access version can be found here:

    “Eco-Miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism.” American Political Science Review, 2023 (online first), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542300031X.

    The abstract is here:

    Eco-miserabilism—the thought that it is already too late to avert the collapse of human civilization—is gaining traction in contemporary environmentalism. This paper offers a “reparative” reading of this post-apocalyptic approach by defending it against those who associate it with defeatism and fatalism. My argument is that authors like Roy Scranton and the members of the Dark Mountain collective, while rejecting mainstream activism, remain invested in a specific kind of (radical) hope. Eco-miserabilists, hence, promote an affective politics for our climate-changed world that is both negative and iconoclastic. Without offering blueprints for a desirable future, they critically interrogate reality and disenchant the “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant) behind reformist plans for a “good Anthropocene.” The ultimate target of the eco-miserabilist position is the illusion that groundbreaking innovations, either in the realm of science and technology or of ordinary representative politics, could redeem us on an environmentally ravaged planet.