Climate Leviathan is a Marxist critique of capitalism through the lens of radical climate change activism. In fact, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright aim to go beyond a mere critique of capitalism, acknowledging that climate change should be regarded as a unique political problem involving the centrality of scientific knowledge, the spatial imbalance of climate change causes and effects, and the temporal inconsistency of the need for immediate responses to future impacts. According to the authors, two conditions are deemed to shape the coming political–economic system (pp. 28–9): the first is whether society will continue to be dominated by capitalism; the second is whether a ‘planetary sovereign’, seen as a world-ruling single entity or organization, will emerge. On this basis, four possible combinations of a future global order under climate change are presented: first, the titular ‘climate Leviathan’, an undesirable variant of Hobbes's Leviathan, a planetary sovereign grounding its power in capitalistic values; second, a ‘climate Mao’, a state-centred entity, for example a truly communist China, discarding capitalism; third, a ‘climate behemoth’ of reactionary populism, which would lead one of the world's superpowers, for example Trump's US, to reject the centrality of the state while continuing to utilize capitalism; and fourth, ‘climate X’, an anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign formation.
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