Anthropoligarchy: Politics and the Nonhuman in the Anthropocene

Abstract:This paper uses resources from ancient democratic theory to assert a deep connection between democracy and environmentalism. I leverage arguments from two critics of Athenian democracy, Aristophanes and Plato, who thundered that democracy was so ontologically destabilizing that it would lead to animals ruling over humans. Using this ancient notion of democracy, the current human/nonhuman relationship can be recast as an eco-political regime called anthropoligarchy, an oligarch/demos conflict in which the human few dominate over a vast nonhuman demos viewed as incapable of ruling. The concept of anthropoligarchy provides a normative framework for understanding environmental politics in the Anthropocene.