Rethinking Freedom in the Anthropocene: Hobbes on the Freedom of Bodies of Water

• In Event: Politics beyond the Human

Abstract

Can Hobbes help us rethink freedom beyond the human species? Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that human history and natural history become indistinguishable in the new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. The same can be argued about notions such as freedom and necessity, since we tend to associate the former with human action, and the latter with the laws of nature. Hobbes seeks to rethink the relation between freedom and necessity in ways that, this paper suggests, are important in the Anthropocene. In particular, Hobbes dedicates several passages to discussing the freedom of bodies of water, especially rivers, to exemplify his overall argument on freedom as absence of opposition or external impediments to motion. Putting Hobbes’s theorization in dialogue with recent social movements that vindicate the freedom of rivers to flow –from “Rivers without Borders” to “Patagonia without Dams”— the paper explores unexpected implications of Hobbes’s materialist understanding of freedom in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Diego Hernan Rossello, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez