Review of Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge

Andrew Ahern

Bruno Latour’s 2017 publication, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, is Latour’s analysis of the many political problems of today, including mass migration and worldwide inequality, all while the issue of climate change hangs in the global communities’ political and intellectual atmosphere exacerbating these phenomena. Coming in at a short 106 pages of text, Latour argues that it is not adherence to “the facts” or bigoted ideologies that is the central political problem of our time, but that the vision of a common world has been abandoned—hence the explosion of inequalities, mass migration, and climate change denial all corresponding to the era known as “deregulation,” “globalization,” or “neoliberalism.” Modernization, argues Latour, has been abandoned, and what the global community has entered is the “New Climatic Regime.”