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Does Eco-Politics Exist and Does it Have Need of a Philosophy? 113 vis-a-vis the power which is currently concentrated in the hands of states operating on the principle of profit and capital groups behaving like expanding empires. The dissatisfied citizens no longer have any chance to change the way power is exercised. Their votes merely operate the mechanism that ensures the rotation of the characters. They no longer shape the conditions of power but rather endure them. If the goal that justifies the existing social order — the multiplication of goods — is proved meaningless and the principle that entitles one to hold power — popular sovereignty — no longer prevails, then we can declare that the given political system has lost its legitimacy. In reality, it is the inexorable logic of raw power that dominates, which is mediated by algorithms and enforced by impersonal automatisms. 3. What is ecological politics? Ecology has become the rallying cry of the radical critique of the late modern industrial mass societies in the last few decades, perhaps not without grounds. The Greek word oikos means house, household, home and is familiar from scientific fields related to associations and livelihood and which study the connection between the two: the interdependence of living beings and the order of their coexistence, whether in nature or in society. The period of civilisation currently ending can be characterised chiefly by the fatal self-conceit with which it sought to invalidate this order. Our efforts in this area met with astounding success, the oikos, our earthly home, has by now become practically speaking uninhabitable and man homeless. The next era will be, if not about destruction and the decay of civilisation, then about the attempt to restore the ecological balance. From now on we have to base our livelihood not on the exhaustion and ruination of natural resources but instead on the wiser use of human abilities. This turn will no doubt affect the hitherto existing division of labour, order of governance and way of evaluating human performance. Political wisdom can no longer content itself with automatically supporting the way of life and procedures of resource management which fit the logic of industrial society, under the guise of neutrality. The admission of our global interdependence and the unfolding ecological catastrophe render unavoidable the justification of individual goals and of the goodness of particular ways of life as well as the rethinking of the institutional framework of the public debate on these
