<p>The Subterrranean Forest studies the historical transition from the agrarian solar energy regime to the use of fossil energy, which has fuelled the industrial transformation of the last 200 years. The author argues that the analysis of historical energy systems provides an explanation for the basic patterns of different social formations. It is the availability of free energy that defines the framework within which socio-metabolic processes can take place. This thesis explains why the industrial revolution started in Britain, where coal was readily available and firewood already depleted or difficult to transport, whereas Germany, with its huge forests next to rivers, was much later. This landmark text was originally published in German in 1982 and was thoroughly revised and updated for the White Horse Press in 2001.</p>

The Subterranean Forest

Business & Money

Sieferle, Rolf Peter

Industries

White Horse Press

Finis Germania

Antaios, Verlag

<p>Rolf Peter Sieferle presented this great essay on the "battlefield of history" in 1994, in the centre of which Germany is resistant to the universalist project of the »West« with its dream of its own way. It shows how accelerated modernism pushes in its constant "flight forward" growing mountain of problems ahead of itself for a hundred years, to cope with which the old ideologies of liberalism, socialism and nationalism are constantly transforming and producing new paradoxes. In the eternal conflict between universalism (proclamation of the general) and particularism (proclamation of the particular), two concepts of history are at the same time irreconcilably opposed. Different orders are connected to them: the Leviathan, a rule of law and absolute power that can lead to the dictatorship, and the Behemoth, where individual freedom threatens to turn into chaos. The vanishing point of salvation from the approaching environmental and resource problems finally becomes the universalist world association led by a global central government. Behind the back of this supposedly saving grand instance, with the loss of the nation states, the original collectives of family clans and tribalist tribes inevitably prevail and thus revoke a two-thousand-year process of civilisation. Sieferle describes in his "Theory of the Present Age" (Hans-Christof Kraus) that particularism wins in the name of universalism: not in favor of freedom, but with social disintegration as a result.</p>

Epochenwechsel: Die Deutschen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Werkausgabe Band 1

Manuscriptum

Die Konservative Revolution: Fünf biographische Skizzen. Werkausgabe 3

History

Europe

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