Does Energy Have History?

Daniela Russ, Assistant Professor, University of Leipzig, TEFE-Fellow, Remarque Institute for European Studies, NYU

History and the social sciences have been plagued by the paradox of treating energy as both natural and historical. On the one hand, following the natural sciences, they see it as an ahistorical property of nature that serves as the material basis of human societies. On the other hand, the formulation of the principle of energy conservation in the mid-nineteenth century represented such a break with mechanical orthodoxy that it triggered investigations into the historicity of knowledge among natural scientists themselves.

This has led to another line of thought that emphasizes the historicity of the concept and sees energy more as a piece of knowledge or ideology. In both perspectives, however, energy remains a thing – in nature or in thought – that is relatively independent of social practice. The paper outlines what a historical materialist approach to the materiality of energy might look like.

Drawing on earlier work that conceptualizes energy as a relation to nature (Bogdanov) or a social relation (Huber), the paper proposes to think of energy as a historically developed material condition of human life. If this condition is historical, ie. did not develop naturally but against nature, what does this mean for the writing of energy and environmental history?