Hultgren's Latest Book Wins National Honor
Faculty member John Hultgren’s book, The Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States, was honored with the Michael Harrington Book Award from the Caucus for a Critical Political Science.
The award is presented annually to “an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle to make the study of political science relevant to building a more democratic and egalitarian economic, social, and political order.”
The award committee lauded Hultgren’s book for examining “the social forces that have kept us from taking meaningful action to counteract the warming of our planet,” while also providing “strategies and political visions that might break this cycle of inaction.” The committee further noted that while Hultgren “dives deep into the theoretical basis for class struggle, his book remains readable for those less familiar with the [academic literature], including undergraduate students.”
The award was announced at the 2026 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston. Hultgren’s book was published in 2025 by MIT Press.