Tragic Liberalism: The Impossible Story of the Anthropocene, Geoff Mann, 26.6.2019 by Goldsmiths UOL

Prof. Geoff Mann (Simon Fraser) delivered the opening keynote lecture at the Risk and Uncertainty in the Anthropocene Conference, hosted by the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths and the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). Mann explored how the Anthropocene represents liberalism’s impossible attempt to narrate its own demise. The Anthropocene undoes liberalism’s rule of temporality, founded on the myth of ‘progress’. It exposes its modes of managing political-economic change – such as through the ‘trade-off’ – and posits the inevitable tragedy of violence, all the while seeking to maintain the pretence that the burden of responsibility is shared. Through recourse to Frank Knight, Hannah Arendt, Max Weber and other thinkers, Mann explores the Anthropocene’s effects on this ‘Tragic Liberalism’.