The Political Theory of Technological Change: Lessons from the Liberalism-Ecologism Debate.

Despite its long-standing significance to much of normative political theory, little consideration has been paid in political theory to the nature of the process of technological change. Given how central this process, and ideas about its nature, are to global climate change policies, this is a remarkable oversight, one that risks political theory being irrelevant to the concrete politics of global climate change mitigation. The implications of this oversight for political theory are explored in this article through an analysis of the Liberalism-Ecologism debate, recently revived by Welburn. The article argues that attempts to green Liberalism – to move it beyond environmentalism – cannot succeed as long as Liberalism is silent on the nature of technological change. More broadly, technological change allows political theories to dream. As we can see in Jasanoff and Kim’s work on ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, the impermanence of material reality, which the continuous process of technological change implies, enables politicians, and political theorists, to imagine better worlds, where the theory-inhibiting inconveniences of current reality can be eliminated. However, the failure to consider how the actual process of technological change accords with these expectations, renders these imaginaries utopian in the worst sense of the word. In general, then, the article argues that technological change has great significance for political theory, yet has been remarkably under theorised. Especially now that they lie at the heart of climate change policy, contests over the meaning of technological change are intensely political contests. Political theory needs to get much more involved.