Preface and acknowledgements

Abstract

This book is an attempt to channel the energy and ideas of an incredibly diverse set of thinkers into a usable political, intellectual and analytical framework. It was born of a desire to help critical approaches to the world around us – from political economy, urban studies, geography, philosophy, ecological economics and more – to operationalize that criticality without succumbing to the temptation of ideology. It strives to be generally useful but resolutely non-universalistic. While it is written by three academics – an urban planner/ geographer, a political philosopher and an energy geographer – we worked hard to tone down the argumentation in the text. We tried to make it less academic by generally avoiding debates with existing authors. Some may find this frustrating – points of contention are either ignored, or consigned to the footnotes. We could have written an entire chapter defending our preference for ‘vertical approaches’, as opposed to horizontal approaches which focus on capitalism or neoliberalism, a decision that will no doubt anger many traditional political economists. We could have cited so many more people, written twice as many words, and engaged more deeply in debate and discussion, but we did not. There were many reasons behind this decision. Manchester University Press contracted us to write a shorter (and cheaper) book, part of a trend in intellectual publishing that we support. Our goal was to try to articulate a set of ideas, not to