Carbon Technocracy
* Book: Carbon Technocracy. Victor Seow.
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Review
Toynbee Prize:
"Victor, in one of the central claims of the book, argues that the search for and the extraction and use of carbon explains the emergence of the modern state. A central premise of the book, as he makes clear in the introduction, is that “the fossil fuel economy made possible the modern state and the modern state the fossil fuel economy.”
This mutual- or co-production has, according to Victor, “defined our modern age.” … Along these same lines, Victor provides a powerful counter-argument to Timothy Mitchell’s linkage of coal mining to the emergence of democratic institutions, …. the coal energy regime in Fushun didn’t lead to the rise of democratic politics as posited by Timothy Mitchell’s now-canonical Carbon Democracy—but rather to the emergence of a modern form of technocracy. Carbon technocracy, like its democratic counterpart, never truly lived up to its own political imaginary. The aspiration for expert control remained a story of “slippage” and unintended consequences. The relationship between coal energy and technocracy was bidirectional."