Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy – Daniela Russ

Book Presentation with Daniela Russ, comments by Liliana Doganova and Jacob Blumenfeld, moderated by Thomas Turnbull

WORKING NATURE  (Verso 2026) – A CRITICAL HISTORY OF ENERGY

Working Nature offers a history of the energy economy and its representations over the 19th and 20th century. Russ argues that “Energy” is not a thing nor an ability, but a social relation to nature forged in capitalist industrialisation. The concept of energy mediates the appropriation of diverse natural forces – water, steam, coal, electricity – altering the way these forces would naturally behave to perform work in production. From the valuation of coal and crafting of the current to the formalization of the substitution of energy commodities, it asks how engineers, scientists and economists achieved the production and circulation of nature’s work against social and natural resistance. In so doing, they undermined the very purpose of the energy economy – to emancipate humanity from nature. Can there be a human reconciliation with nature’s resistance for our time?

Daniela Russ is a historical sociologist based at the Global and European Studies Institute of the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her research explores the history of the energy economy in a global perspective, the conflicts around the decarbonization of the electric grid, and the theory and practice of Soviet energy planning. Her work has been published by outlets such as Contemporary European History, Historical Materialism, and Stanford University Press.

Liliana Doganova is an Associate Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines Paris PSL University. At the intersection of economic sociology and Science and Technology Studies, her work has focused on business models, the valorization of public research and markets for bio- and clean-technologies. Her latest book, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024, Zone Books), explores the links between valuation and temporality through a historical sociology of the technique of discounting the future.

Thomas Turnbull is a historical geographer at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Thomas is interested in the history of energy conservation as an economic and political objective. He has published on this and other topics in The Journal of Historical Geography, History and Technology, Environmental Humanities, and Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. He is the co-editor, along with Daniela Russ, of Energy’s History Toward a Global Canon (Stanford 2025).

Jacob Blumenfeld is a philosopher at the Centre for Social Critique, Humboldt University Berlin, where he co-directs the research project Socialization in Theory and Practice: Democratizing Access to Land and Energy. He is the author of The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel (Routledge, 2024), and co-editor of Umkämpftes Eigentum: Eine gesellschaftstheoretische Debatte (Suhrkamp, 2025).