Many people today are concerned about the implications of climate change for their personal reproductive decisions. Some have transformed such concerns into activism by engaging in a “birth strike” and publicly announcing their decision not to procreate because of climate change. This article draws on Hannah Arendt to examine the political meaning and significance of birth strikes. It makes three basic points. First, by highlighting the human condition of being born, what Arendt called natality, birth strikes have illuminated a distinctive set of threats and possibilities for climate politics. Second, due to modern consumerism and instrumentalism, which Arendt saw as the dominance of labor and work over action, birth strikes have been misperceived as advocating a reduction in personal carbon footprints and global population growth. Third, birth strikes have clarified some of the challenges for efforts to link the individual and collective dimensions of climate responsibility.

We are entering the age of planetary politics defined by consciousness of human impact on the Earth System, and the planetary ecosystem's responses to our activities. This poses a major challenge to democratic theory. How do we protect life without evoking a planetary sovereign? This article argues that the planetary condition requires imaginatively expanding existing democratic concepts to make room for new connections, realities, and beginnings. It demonstrates this by focusing on Hannah Arendt's notion of plurality as the law of the earth. Read through the Roman lex, which emerges from the conflict between the plebs and the patricians, this notion helps us imagine a planetary politics premised on the creation of new relationships between previously discrete entities. Building on this interpretation, I discuss scientific expertise and indigenous perspectives as modes of cultivating political imagination to expand our understanding of the democratic stage beyond the human species.

Is Hannah Arendt's political thought relevant to the contemporary planetary situation? This article draws on The Human Condition and some of Arendt's ancient and modern sources to answer this question, using a phenomenological distinction between outdoors and indoors to make sense of three likely types of artificial adaptation to a warming planet. Arendt's account of the importance of the “body-bound senses” of an “earth-bound creature” need not result in the problematic fetishization of immediate rather than mediated knowledge, or of an “earthly nature” supposedly prior to and independent of the human artifice, but can draw attention to the narrowing of human beings’ “angle of receptivity” to a surprising and unpredictable reality. This perspective, however, also discloses the limits of Arendt's work in the face of ecological transformations that are simultaneously planetary in scale and highly unequal in their consequences.

This article examines animals and animality in Hannah Arendt's political thought by focusing on the phenomenological approach she develops in The Life of the Mind. Building on the works of Adolf Portmann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Arendt invites us to understand the world in terms of the plurality of all living things who appear to each other in anticipation of being perceived in their distinctness. While Arendt's phenomenology is generative for rethinking politics beyond human exclusivity, it also sits uneasily with her anthropocentric claims that risk reducing animals to reactive organisms driven by biological necessity. Mobilizing Arendt's phenomenology against her anthropocentrism, the article outlines a worldly politics in which all living things engage in multitudinous forms of intra- and interspecies encounter, reciprocity, and responsiveness. To illustrate this worldly politics, the article revisits Arendt's famous call for “a right to have rights” and engages with the debates on animal rights.

Rasoul Namazi's Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought is a wonderful tour through, well, Leo Strauss's reading of medieval Islamic political philosophy (as well as, or including, the Arabian Nights) and much of the secondary literature surrounding both the reception of Strauss's ideas and methods and the obstruction of such a reception on the part of mainstream historical and philological scholarship. One of the many great virtues and contributions of Namazi's book is that it resists the traditional insularity of Straussian and non-Straussian schools alike, seeking to read with an open mind non- and anti-Straussian scholars while modestly yet confidently making a case for why non-Straussians should read Strauss on Islamic political philosophy.

Rasoul Namazi's Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought contains patient and perceptive readings of four texts Strauss devoted to Islamic political philosophy. My comments are limited to just one of those readings, that of “Fârâbî's Plato,” and to a single issue within it—the question of the identity of the philosopher or of philosophy. Namazi rightly recognizes the centrality of this question in “Fârâbî's Plato.” As Strauss writes in explaining Alfarabi's view of Plato's philosophy, “the central question concerns . . . the precise meaning of the philosopher” (361), and Namazi claims that it is “one of the main themes or even the theme of ‘Fârâbî's Plato’” (148, emphasis original).

An awareness of the controversy surrounding Strauss pervades Namazi's work. His apologia is a labor of love: erudite, painstaking, uncompromising. Namazi highlights Strauss's contribution to Islamic political thought and argues for the continued relevance of the Straussian approach. There is much to recommend in the book but I restrict myself to what I take to be its more problematic aspects.

The two distinct audiences Namazi identifies for his book are those interested in either Strauss or medieval Islamic philosophy. But his engrossing study of Strauss's engagement with Islamic political thought carries value for a wider audience beyond these specializations. Considering Strauss's engagement with medieval Islamic philosophy raises questions of significance regarding the relationship between European and Islamic thought. Namazi does not raise these questions directly, but this thoughtful study is valuable for those looking to understand and delineate the distinctiveness of European thought.