Book Review: Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg (eds), Political Animals and Animal Politics
| Author | Josh Milburn |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929916656570 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsPolitical Theory |
Book Reviews 427
political implications, by way of essays focused
upon four major thinkers: Plato, Niccolò
Machiavelli, Immanuel Kant and Max Weber.
Webel provides both historical context and a
lucid summary exposition of the ideas of these
four. Plato is the first perfector of the idea and
(quasi-mystical) ideal of theoretical reason,
whose reason doubles as a fantasia on how to
justify and enforce Plato’s preferred aristocratic
regime. Machiavelli is the relativiser, who
detached the mental faculty of reason from the
conception of reason as an ideal inseparable
from the ends of abstract virtue, and reattached
it, within the historical world, to the good of the
(republican) state. Kant is the great restorer,
whose riposte to the challenges of (sceptical,
materialising) early modern thought was to
secure reason upon a base of transcendental
metaphysics; history itself was now incorpo-
rated into a rationalising process intended to
harmonise humanity’s world with the exercise
of Kantian reason. Weber is the second detacher,
who reconceived Kant’s rationalisation process
in history as one of formal rationality rather than
of substantive rationality, and who exiled the
ends of reason into the realm of the irrational.
Webel has written an essayistic overview
of the subject rather than a detailed mono-
graph, and a rather good one – his narrative is
brisk, lucid, often quietly funny and generally
stylish. He emphasises how reason for all four
figures incorporated in sublimated and unex-
amined fashion various a priori ideals – mys-
ticism, the good of the republic, scientific
objectivity and so on – and thus has been all
too often a hodge-podge of procedural reason
and substantive reason, the latter conflated
with the idols of the age and given no mean-
ing more definite than doubleplusgood. With
an eye to both the strengths and follies of rea-
son highlighted in this narrative, Webel con-
cludes with an attractive appeal for a reason
that aspires within history from the proce-
dural towards the substantive, but with a chas-
tened and common-sense awareness of its
limitations.
The bibliography, however, especially of the
historical contextualisation, largely dates from
before 1975: the vintage gives pause and sup-
ports some dated interpretations. Nevertheless,
this is an insightful work, of particular use for
assignment to intelligent undergraduates and
graduate students, useful as a survey by
non-specialists, and worth the time of special-
ists as a thoughtful reading.
David Randall
(New York Studio School)
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929916656569
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Political Animals and Animal Politics by
Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg
(eds). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
180pp., £60.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781137434616
This collection contains 10 original papers (plus
a substantial introduction) broadly in the bur-
geoning field labelled ‘animal political philoso-
phy’ (p. 1). The chapters vary in methodology
and focus and, perhaps inevitably, some of the
papers are a better fit than others. The book is
split into three sections which correspond to
three key themes identified in the introduction:
first, the transition from the traditional ‘moral’
animal ethics to the newer ‘political’ animal eth-
ics; second, the putative ‘rapprochement
between animal ethics and ecologism’ (p. 2) and
third, the real-world politico-legal develop-
ments which benefit non-human animals. The
first section contains Manuel Arias-Maldonado’s
suggestion that sympathy is the appropriate
political tool for thinking about non-human ani-
mals within a framework of human exceptional-
ism, followed by Marcel Wissenburg’s challenge
to both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ liberal frameworks of
animal rights with an alternative (but provoca-
tively underdeveloped) species-sensitive pro-
posal, and Chad Flanders’ critical examination
of the status of non-human animals and animal
political advocacy in Rawlsian thought. These
chapters, along with the introduction, establish
the volume well. Wissenburg’s paper is particu-
larly strong, although I confess that I disagree
with his claims.
The second section feels weaker, as it does
not clearly address the second theme identi-
fied in the introduction. The contributions
from Christie Smith and David Schlosberg are
fairly light on animal ethics, concerned instead
with the use of particular approaches in politi-
cal theory (recognition theory and the capa-
bilities approach, respectively) to defend the
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