Рецензия на книгу: Beckert J. 2024. How We Sold Our Future:The Failure to Fight Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity Press (translated by R. Cunningham). 227 p

Abstract

Recently, anthropogenic climate change as a result of human activity during the Industrial Revolution, linked to accelerated fossil fuel combustion, greenhouse gas emissions, land-use change, and deforestation, has reached its peak and has been termed a climate crisis. From a social science perspective, the climate crisis is not only, and not so much, a geophysical phenomenon as a socioeconomic and political failure, an inevitable product of structural capitalist modernity. The latest book of Jens Beckert, Professor of Sociology and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies at Cologne ‘How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change’ offers a systematic analysis of why modern societies are unable to respond adequately to the climate crisis. The author provides a structural diagnosis of systemic impasse and climate inaction, explaining why the pressure of the economic growth paradigm within capitalism is too strong to allow for a timely response to the climate crisis. Through the lens of ‘capitalist modernity’, Beckert demonstrates how the fusion of economic institutions (profit orientation, competition, credit), political structures (the state, multi-level governance, lobbying), and cultural patterns (individualism, belief in progress, nature as a resource) blocks necessary transformations. He systematically shows how the logic of short-term gain shapes the behavior of key actors: oil corporations employing the ‘politics of uncertainty’ and the ‘politics of expectations’; states trapped in electoral cycles and dependent on business; and consumers whose identities are embedded in a culture of limitless consumption. Particular attention is devoted to critiquing the paradigm of ‘green growth’, which Beckert argues is a dangerous illusion that leaves the structures of capitalist modernity unchanged. In developing climate policy measures, the author adopts a stance of ‘considered realism’, placing hope in grassroots civic initiatives and the pursuit of politically feasible policies that account for the interests of the state, the economy, and society. The book makes a significant contribution to economic sociology by offering a conceptual framework for understanding the climate crisis as a failure not only of the market, but also of the state and culture.