Abstract

This project closely examines the relationship between conceptions of nature and politics in the writings of contemporary environmentalist thinkers and in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Aristotle. Two interpretations of this relationship, which I term the dualist and derivative accounts, dominate discussions about all of these works. Yet both readings submerge the complex interactions that actually exist between conceptions of nature and politics. I reconstruct an alternative way of thinking about the nature-politics relationship, in this dissertation, grounded in careful attention to the dynamics of this relationship in the texts of Hobbes and Aristotle. This alternative respects the very important insight--highlighted by contemporary environmentalists--that nature and the natural world play a role in constituting human communities and possibilities. At the same time, I reject claims that an embrace of nature can offer definitive standards from which social and political argument can be derived. I argue instead that a dialectic between nature and politics is both inescapable and critical to recognize. This recognition cannot offer legitimization for a particular political order. It can, however, prompt us to see the equally inescapable necessity of political judgments to political theory as well as practice. Unless or until we recognize this, our theorizing will be handicapped either by an inability to appreciate the significance of nature and the natural world for contemporary politics, or by a failure to acknowledge the role of political judgments in shaping the ways in which nature is understood. In either case, the tragic consequence is that our practices are left unguided at a time when such guidance is desperately needed