Round table in English with Alyssa Battistoni, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lillian Cicerchia, Maeve Cooke, and Massimiliano Tomba, moderated by Robin Celikates and Rahel Jaeggi.
Topic
That “human beings make their own history” is a truism. Unfortunately, as we know from the famous opening page of Marx’s 18th Brumaire, a “but” has to qualify the simple proposition. Human beings do not make history under self-selected circumstances. Although human beings made some of these circumstances in the past (traditions, institutions, technologies), others are not a direct outcome of their agency – natural processes, geographies, planetary boundaries. Some directly materialize as structures in the world; others are conceptually mediated. They all condition human agency and thus the way history is made.
While the idea that human beings make history in the singular has been criticized for a long time for the Eurocentric, racist and colonial tendencies characterizing many of its presumably universal articulations, it has more recently come under pressure in different ways. From an environmental or even planetary perspective, trust in the power and independence of human agency seems misplaced. To conceptualize history today from a materialist perspective requires to acknowledge planetary limits and imminent ecological disasters in ways that seem to require a reformulation of Marx’s proposition.
In the Summer School, we therefore aim to explore anew the scope and nature of historical agency in the face of the forces of history that exceed that agency. We will focus on ecological and other forces of history and ask: What are their consequences for our understanding of history and emancipation? Does the acknowledgment of non-human forces in history entail the splintering of history into a plurality of histories? And how does the planetary reframing of history affect the relation of subaltern histories to the idea of universal history?
The public roundtable of this year’s International Critical Theory Summer School will provide an opportunity to discuss approaches to history and historical agencies.
Speaker
Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. Alyssa is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025). Her academic work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, NOMOS, Perspectives on Politics, and Contemporary Political Theory, and she writes frequently for publications including the New Left Review, n+1, the Nation, Dissent, and Jacobin.
Lillian Cicerchia is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. She works in political philosophy, critical theory, and feminism. She is working on a book manuscript titled Freedom and Class, where she argues that class politics make an essential contribution to democracy that has been overlooked by decades of post-Marxist social criticism in both normative political philosophy and critical theory. Her published work includes essays on labor republicanism, class solidarity, social reproduction and the state, and why critical theory does not pay attention to the economy.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor for History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is a well-known critic of Eurocentric narratives of progress and is demonstrating the entanglement of ‘Empire’, labor and ecology. The growing importance of ecology leads him to attempts to rethink concepts like politics, freedom and responsibility beyond anthropocentric limits. Chakrabarty has been awarded with the Toynbee Prize and several honorary doctorates and memberships, for example in the universities of London or the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Some of his major works are Rethinking Working-Class History (Princeton UP, 1989), Provincializing Europe (Princeton UP, 2000), The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Oxford UP, 2018), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago UP, 2021), and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023).
Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. She works on Critical Social Theory, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law. She is the author of Re-Presenting the Good Society (2006) and Transformations in Critical Theory: Decentrings, Openings, Futures (forthcoming on 15 May 2026, Polity Press). Cooke has been recently awarded with the prestigeous Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2026 – 2029).
Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer, La vera politica, Marx’s Temporalities, Insurgent Universality, Attraverso la Piccola Porta. Quattro studi su Benjamin, and Revolution and Restoration. He is also co-editor of the journal Political Theory. He is currently working on two projects: one on Marx’s use of the Factory Reports, and another on the canon of the history of philosophy.