Sociocentrism, the Anthropocene, and the Planetary

This chapter criticizes continuing tendencies to sociocentrism and humanist exceptionalism in the humanities and human sciences. To discern these tendencies in their strong form the chapter compares four diverse modernists: Rousseau, Isaiah Berlin, Hayek, and Marx. The idea of the Anthropocene is revised along several dimensions to take into account more actively the bumpy history of planetary processes before capitalism and other extractive cultures and to dramatize regional asymmetries in the sources and effects of climate change.