On the Earth Ethic : Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty

This interview with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses his book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (The University of Chicago Press, 2021) which proposes understanding the human condition during times of crisis from both a planetary and a global perspective. In this interview, Chakrabarty suggests that adopting a planetary perspective, which de-centres the human, can provide a new outlook that enables us to respond more effectively to contemporary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, something that is urgently necessary due to the failure of human agency to adequately deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. He further addresses the ambivalent role that technology and the state play in today’s troubled times. The interview was conducted as part of the international lecture series “Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes” which seeks to discuss the ambivalent consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on social life. The lecture series, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, was developed in collaboration with the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and the Institute for Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.