Science and Democracy Lecture
Date and Time
Climate Crisis and the Misconception of Growth
Speaker
- Timothy Mitchell, William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Columbia University.
Contact
Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
In the face of climate catastrophe, why have existing conceptions of collective life appeared so impervious to critique? One concept stands out: the idea of the economy and our preoccupation with its continued growth. For most people, including its critics, economic growth appears as the inevitable movement of capitalist society, driven by a process of technological improvement or an endless accumulation of capital. It is almost never connected to capitalization, or the capitalist modes of indebting and extracting payment from the future. Growth is better understood as a device for securing the repayment of debt. This does not make it any less damaging to collective well-being. But it does allow growth to be grasped not as the inevitable movement of capitalist development but as a more recent arrangement that arises from—rather than simply causing—a mode of living at the expense of the future.
Bio
Timothy Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the MESAAS Department from 2011 to 2017. Educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University in the fields of law, history, and politics, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. His writings, which have been translated into Arabic and fifteen other languages, examine the history of colonialism, the politics of energy, the political economy of capitalism, and the making of expert knowledge. His books include Colonising Egypt, Rule of Experts, and Carbon Democracy. A new book, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow, is being published in March 2026.