ABSTRACT
Few could dispute that climate inaction is a result of politics. The academic discipline specializing in the study of politics appears to be paralyzed in analyzing, explaining, and helping to prevent collective self-destructing behavior. This chapter argues that the discipline was at first a passive victim of the neoliberal expansion through economic imperialism and subsequently an active promoter of the neoliberal way of thinking, contributing to impediments of climate mitigation. By unquestioningly adopting the neoliberal “methodological individualism”—embracing the “rational” (utilitarian, calculating, self-interest maximization) approach that always took the individual, as opposed to the community, society, or the commons, as the starting point of inquiry—political science aided and abetted society to court the neoliberal order. The chapter examines the crucial role that neoliberal economist James Buchanan played in revolutionizing political science with the aim of rendering the discipline a facilitating force in the undermining of democracy. As Jon Elster alluded to, public choice or rational choice theories were above all normative theories. They work as dog whistles, shaping human behavior into conformity with neoliberal ideal, as the inventors of such theories had intended.
