The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism: A Political-Economic Critique of

Environmental sociology must address two challenges, emanating both from without and within. The world is faced with a growing planetary rift, as planetary boundaries are being crossed. At the same time a new exemptionalism in the form of ecological modernization theory has arisen within environmental sociology, resurrecting many aspects of the human exemptionalist model characteristic of post–Second World War modernization theory that environmental sociology in its formative years opposed. The answer to these two challenges, it is argued, lies in the development of a political-economic and rational-historical critique of the capitalist environmental regime in the traditions of Marx and Weber. This demands, however, the outright rejection of the new exemptionalism. Keywords exemptionalism, ecological modernization theory, environmental sociology, new ecologica