Deborah R. Coen. Climate in Motion

Environmental historian Julia Adeney Thomas recently sent me an essay about history in the Anthropocene, in which she muses, “Perhaps the Anthropocene’s greatest challenge to historical practice is that it doesn’t provide enough uncertainty to give us hope.” Deborah R. Coen, whose first book was on the subject of uncertainty itself (Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life [2007]), provides in Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale a history of the origins of modern thinking about climate science. It is the problem of scale and multiscalar thinking, rather than the problem of anthropogenic climate change, that is the red thread running through the monograph, and it offers opportunities to rethink Habsburg political and social history as much as the history of science. Climate in Motion is simultaneously a history of the modern understanding of climate (specifically of dynamic climatology) and a history of science in the Habsburg Monarchy, the nameless “empire” of the title. As depressed as anyone who takes science seriously now is about the state of the global environment and its capacity to support human life, we cannot hold a candle to the depression that suffused early twentieth-century histories of the Habsburg Monarchy. From 1918 until well after the Second World War, the theme of writing about the monarchy was its retrospectively inevitable collapse. “The situation is desperate, but not serious,” wrote Alfred Polgar in 1922, and by the 1930s the quotation had been predated to prewar Vienna and, later, even attributed to Karl Kraus. Thanks to numerous literary critics and intellectual historians, most principally Carl Schorske, the Vienna of 1900 came in the twentieth century to epitomize the slow, decadent unfolding of a disaster everyone could foresee and no one could believe would ever really come.

Anthropocene · Archaeology · Empire · Environmental ethics · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies