Joel Schlosser and Rafi Youatt address our current age of the Anthropocene—the “human-made epoch” heralding the “end of nature” (Schlosser, p. 3; Youatt, p. 6)—with a shared commitment. The Anthropocene, they claim, is not a new age but simply reveals an old and already present truth: that “the imagined divide between nature and culture” is an anthropocentric fiction (Schlosser, p. 3). The announcement of the Anthropocene age and our attentiveness to the influence of humanity on the planet counterintuitively illuminate the prospect of looking beyond the premise of the Anthropocene itself, with Schlosser and Youatt directing our attention to the more diverse and complex reality that lies beneath the presumption that all things begin and end with the human. As Schlosser writes, “thinkers of the Anthropocene” (p. 5) must “allow the dynamic complexity of the world to remain alive in the minds and actions of political actors” (p. 16). The era of human influence, now outwardly conscious of its identity and effects, must seek to undo its own foundation.

Schlosser claims that lessons for the thinkers of the Anthropocene can be learned from the past. He turns to Herodotus because “at the heart of the Histories stands a concern with the complex interactions of human and nonhuman forces—of political leaders and ordinary groups of people, on the one hand, and oceans, rivers, and ineffable, perhaps divine forces, on the other. Herodotus’s Histories anticipates the dynamic and complex reality to which the Anthropocene calls attention” (p. 6). Schlosser claims that Herodotus emphasizes the importance of collective agency in forming and sustaining communities through the establishment of nomoi (customs, habits, culture). Contrary to a conception of nomoi as laws that are imposed on a people or community, Schlosser draws a practice of nomoi out of the Histories. Herodotus’s “attention to nonhuman factors” means that “nomoi do not simply ‘rest’ on top of inert environments; instead, the ecologies of nomoi are living, dynamic systems, and the natural world is a player in Herodotus’s drama” (p. 83). Polities are therefore also ecologies, and there is no divide between physis and nomos, nature and culture. The depiction of an “abundance of diverse and distinct political communities” (p. 88) in the Histories offers an ancient vision for thinking in the Anthropocene—one that prioritizes the many collective agencies that exist in the world and remains open to wondrous new forms of life and earthly flourishing.

Schlosser’s rich and detailed account of the Histories will be of great interest to scholars of Herodotus, stretching far beyond Herodotus’s relevance to the Anthropocene. There are textually detailed and careful readings of the many episodes of the Histories, rethinking and reinterpreting foundational ideas such as nomoi, the oikeomenê (the known world), equality (which Schlosser demonstrates Herodotus uses in three forms—isonomia [equality of law], isêgoria [equal speech], and isokratia [equal power]), and freedom (elutheria). The account of the many freedoms in the Histories (Spartan, Persian, Scythian, Ionian, Athenian) points in particular to Schlosser’s overall thesis about the link between the form and content of Herodotus’s work: “attending to Herodotus’s varied accounts of freedom across the Histories changes the significance of what appears like the culmination of a single story: namely, the Greeks’ victory over the Persians” (p. 130). Just as there are diverse actors in the world—including “gods, rivers, storms, and camels” (p. 129)—so too are the Histories themselves “polyvocal, in J. Peter Euben’s term, speaking with multiple voices and emplotting multiple narratives” (p. 97). Schlosser thus calls for a polyvocal “Herodotean inquiry” (p. 134) for the Anthropocene era: a narration that, in its accounting for the true complexity of the world, would also open up a new world more attentive to its underlying diversity.

In many ways, Rafi Youatt’s Interspecies Politics is just the kind of Herodotean inquiry Schlosser desires. Turning from the past to the future, Youatt looks forward to the possibilities of a more dynamic and complex political world that, like a Herodotean history, would reject the “dualist axes of nature and culture” (p. 133). Youatt calls for an interspecies politics that acknowledges the relational, multispecies practices constituting our shared social realities. Youatt convincingly argues that international relations (IR) is particularly well positioned to address our interspecies reality, because it is the field of political science that remains attentive to the relationships of interdependent or competing communities, which for Youatt includes animal populations and natural bodies. These communities already participate in the practice of forming borders, security regimes, and conceptions of sovereignty over top of which we have, until now, erroneously “superimpose[d] a kind of political community that is largely human in conception” (p. 93). For Youatt, politics has always been a practice of negotiation between human and nonhuman actors; one of “relative fluidity … in the ongoing mixture of ecological, material, and social registers” (p. 29) that has been obscured by our anthropocentrism.

An interspecies politics “includes an acceptance of multispecies sovereignty” (p. 93), demonstrated using specific case examples—or, in Herodotean terms, polyvocal histories. Just as Schlosser writes that in the Histories the “construction of the known world depends upon relational thinking” (Schlosser, p. 40), so, too, does Youatt show that political practices in the world, such as establishing borders, are in fact interspecies “relational practice(s)” (Youatt, p. 30). Focusing on the interrelated movements of animal and human communities on the ground—ocelots and nilgai on the US-Mexico border, hutia (banana rats) at Guantánamo, wolves on Michigan’s Isle Royale—Youatt constructs an “interspecies international” from a diversity of narratives (p. 23). Borders, for example, must be reconceived as permeable norms (nomoi for Schlosser) or mobility regimes, rather than static lines of exclusion. Youatt’s border analysis illuminates most clearly the overall thesis of Interspecies Politics: that we must differentiate between the border “as an idea” and the border as a “set of practices” (p. 45). On a more universal scale, Youatt sees this as a distinction between decontextualized “global forms” of international relations and the “actual global” of heterogeneous interspecies assemblages (p. 143). Most broadly, this is a distinction between the simple (universalizing, singular), and the complex (diverse, multiple).

Like Youatt, Schlosser heavily critiques the totalizing simplicity of formal universality. Addressing Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, Schlosser suggests that Schmitt’s consideration of nomos only in the singular “is ultimately Hegelian in its totalizing … [lacking attention] to what Theodor Adorno called the ‘cross-grained, opaque, [and] unassimilated material’ that stands outside universal history” (p. 87). In contrast, Schlosser claims that Herodotus’s Histories depicts an abundance of diverse and distinct political communities” (p. 88), maintaining an “ecological understanding of nomoi” that accounts for the “world’s dynamic complexity” (p. 87). Schlosser and Youatt both presume a material or practical reality that has been present all along, lying in wait unseen, beyond the confines of the anthropocentric nature–culture divide. Just as in Karl Marx’s response to Hegel’s “totalizing” idealism, this accounting for the historically material reality of world history posits the superimposition of an ideal superstructure —a “universal history”—that in Youatt’s terms is “overlaid and affiliated with a deep and abiding anthropocentrism” (p. 145), just as universalizing global forms have obscured the “actual global” of interspecies assemblages.

Youatt suggests, much like Schlosser, that for the duration of human history, we have been “looking at the wrong ‘units.’ Interspecies assemblages are recognizable units of analysis in the Anthropocene, and, as this book suggests, they were also the underrecognized units of Westphalian political ecology” (p. 145). Youatt calls for the “emergence of new formations” (p. 93) of being in the world, contingent on the recognition that the unifying “symbolic” orders under which we live—of presuming a divide between human and animal, and nature and culture—must be rethought by “accounting for some of the various acts, affects, and performances of non-human entities, which coproduce the symbolic” (p. 108). The symbolic order must thus be re-produced to more accurately reflect the diverse and complex material practice that has always been present at the base of our historical and ecological reality.

However, in the last analysis, we might still question the extent to which these two fine books ultimately manage to transcend “the imagined divide between nature and culture” (Schlosser, p. 3). In Schlosser and Youatt’s argument there is still an imagined divide between (universal) history and a material reality: one that suggests that the overturning of a hitherto totalizing universal history will enable the coming-to-being of an alternatively universal (that is, omnipresent yet unrecognized) history, grounded in a material reality. The denial of the nature–culture divide therefore rests on the premise that there is—and always has been—a nature–culture divide: a divide between history and its substrate, more diverse material.

It is not that we need to recognize in the Anthropocene that we have always been looking at the wrong units of history or that the nature–culture divide has always been a fiction. It is the reverse. The divide between nature and culture, or material and universal history, is reality, even for Schlosser and Youatt; what remains in the realm of fiction—or possible alternative histories and futures—is the prospect that this divided reality could change. The goal of overcoming the Anthropocene thus seems embedded in the very universalizing world-historical discourse that this goal needs or seeks to reject. There would have to be a totalizing re-formation of the ground—both material and symbolic—on which we could claim that there is an unseen, ecological, diversely political “reality” beneath our anthropocentric errors. Until this new world-historical epoch emerges, we are all very much in the Anthropocene. Because of these important interventions from Schlosser and Youatt, we are now perhaps more conscious of our “dualist axes,” yet we still remain far from truly imagining their eradication or thinking beyond their division.