Between Earth and World
Hannah Arendt on the Space and Time of Politics
About this event
5 May, 2026. 16:00-18:00
GS4, Donald Mclntyre Building, Faculty of Education
184 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PQ
Our sense of space and time is under pressure from two seemingly unconnected directions: the unravelling of earthly conditions by climate change and the displacement of human judgment by algorithmic calculation. Political theory struggles to articulate what, if anything, unites these currents. This lecture considers Hannah Arendt’s distinction between earth and world – the given conditions of biological life and the humanly-constructed artifice standing between people and across generations – as offering a potential perspective on these developments. For Arendt, when natural and technological processes collapse the distinction between earth and world, our sense of space and time is transformed and we are left ‘worldless’. I trace her understanding of this boundary and its collapse through her underexplored relationship to German idealist philosophy, the intellectual history of sovereignty and mid-twentieth-century debates about technology. These engagements reveal the centrality to her thought of a critique of ‘process-thinking’ – a form of ratiocination modelled on the natural sciences that substitutes process for judgment, and calculable sequence for durable political space. In response, Arendt conceived of judgment as the spatial and temporal practice foreclosed by such logic. Finally, the lecture considers how this intellectual history might speak to a genocidal present in which our sense of political space and time are being unravelled by ecological crisis and computational reason.
About the Speaker
Waseem Yaqoob is a historian of political thought at Queen Mary University of London. He specialises in ideas about politics, race and international order in the twentieth century. His first book, ‘History and Judgment: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt’ is under contract with Princeton University Press. He is also working on a second book project reassessing federalist ideas in the twentieth century. Prior to joining QMUL in 2019 he was Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and Randall-Dillard Research Fellow in Politics at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
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