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The theoretical work of Thomas Hobbes marks the dawn of political modernity and thus also the beginning of modern reasoning about governing. In his Leviathan, Hobbes creates the modern space of the political through the exclusion of the world's social and natural abundance. This crossroads of political thinking might not least be of relevance for the Anthropocene. After all, affirming the Anthropocene returns mankind to a cosmos of infinite human–nature interrelationships, which strongly resembles Hobbes's conceptual depiction of the premodern state of nature and its incomprehensible, contingent, and precarious world, a world that Hobbes had intended to ban for good. In this context, this article reconsiders the state of nature's internal dynamics in its relevance for governing in the Anthropocene—at the expense of the normative claims of modernist governing. After all, embracing the complex ontologies of the Anthropocene and the state of nature disperses agency among the human and nonhuman world, which questions the idea of ethical and political accountability. Without such a reference, governing runs the risk of becoming arbitrary and thereby another shallow projection of modernist conceptions. This article develops an interpretation of political subjectivity as a reference for governing, deriving from the materialistic world of the Hobbesian state of nature. On this foundation, the article elaborates on how this reading of subjectivity reconfigures the conception of political space and how this shift affects the scope of governing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marx and Engels warned that class struggle would result “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” This essay argues that through the effect of neoliberal networked economy, we have had both a “revolutionary reconstitution of society” and the “common ruin” of both bourgeois and proletarian classes. Their “common ruin” is expressed through their lack of viability as the basis for their respective democratic projects—liberalism and socialism. The revolution in information technologies and the rise of the neoliberal network society has transformed the nature of political power that had been founded upon traditional industrial forms of production and social–political organization. The essay develops a theory of technological change and a subsequent transformation in our relationship with time. By emphasizing the dialectic of technological–temporal change in the nature and quality of political power, we see that the very basis of both power and politics has become transformed in ways that negatively affect the potential of democratic forms of power, liberal, or socialist. The essay ends with a call for a new political approach to time, a “temporal sovereignty” to revive and renew the basis of democracy within a networked society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]