Abstract
If we look at history from the animal standpoint, that is, from the crucial role that animals have played in human evolution and the consequences of human domination of nonhuman animals, we can glean new and invaluable insights into psychological, social, historical, and ecological phenomena, problems, and crises. The animal standpoint is used here to shed new light on the origins, dynamics, and development of dominator cultures, as well as to redefine the dysfunctional power systems that structure our relationships to one another, to other species, and to the natural world, in hierarchical rather than complementary terms.
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Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power ( New York: Vintage, 1968 ).
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 ).
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution ( New York: Harper & Row, 1983 ).
On Marxist and Foucauldian theories of history, see Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, and Habermas ( New York: Guilford Press, 1995 ).
Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature. ( New York: Lantern Books, 2006 ).
See Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture ( New York: Plume, 1995 ).
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2005 ), p. 91.
On the profound influence of animal viruses on human health and society, see Michael Greger, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching ( New York: Lantern Books, 2006 ).
Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust ( New York: Lantern Books, 2002 ), p. 109.
Quoted in Franklin Le Van Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978 ), p. 774.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972 ), p. 257.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality ( Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2005 ), p. 114.
Mary Shelly, Frankenstein ( New York: Penguin Books, 1992 ).
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit ( New York: Bantham, 1995 ).
Hardy cited in Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics ( Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989 ), p. 43.
See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ).
Jensen, “What Goes Up Must Come Down,” in Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella (eds.), Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth ( Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006 ), p. 287.
Derrick Jensen, “World at Gunpoint: Or, What’s Wrong with the Simplicity Movement,” Orion Magazine, May/June 2009, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4697/.
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© 2014 Steven Best
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Best, S. (2014). The Animal Standpoint. In: The Politics of Total Liberation. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440723_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440723_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50086-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44072-3
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