Critical Analysis: ‘The Climate of History: Four Thesis’, Dipesh Chakrabarty

5 Pages • Essays / Projects • Year Uploaded: 2021

My analysis focuses on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s second thesis in ‘The Climate of History: Four Thesis’ (207-212). In this thesis, Chakrabarty examines the conception of ‘Anthropocene’ as the new geological epoch where humans bear agency and exist as a geological force. The notion of ‘freedom’ is scrutinized, which Chakrabarty ascertains has meant different things at different times, to different people at different periods—serving as a blanket category for diverse imaginations of human autonomy and sovereignty. While ‘freedom’ has been the most important motif governing the written accounts of human history and its developments, Chakrabarty notes that there has been a prominent omission of any awareness of geological agency that accompanied human beings in their acquisition of freedom ever since the Enlightenment period. Most focus fell on the evolution of human beings and how they escaped the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems, but too little on any geological aspect—thus separating geological time and the chronology of human histories. Chakrabarty identifies humankind’s heavy reliance on energy-intensive processes in their pursuit of ‘freedom’, starting from 1750 when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel. He ascertains that the foundation of modern freedoms stand on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use, and the geological agent of humankind has only been on a rapid increase as our population numbers soared, prompting the accelerated burning of fossil fuel and other related activities. With that, ‘Anthropocene’ became recognized as the beginning of a new geological era in which humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the planet.

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