• DOI:10.1177/1478929916656570
• Corpus ID: 147998881

Book Review: Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg (eds), Political Animals and Animal Politics

@article{Milburn2016BookRM,
  title={Book Review: Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg (eds), Political Animals and Animal Politics},
  author={Josh Milburn},
  journal={Political Studies Review},
  year={2016},
  volume={14},
  pages={427 - 428}
}

• Josh Milburn
• Published 8 July 2016
• Philosophy
• Political Studies Review

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 incorporated 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 monograph, 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 unexamined fashion various a priori ideals – mysticism, 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 meaning more definite than doubleplusgood. With an eye to both the strengths and follies of reason highlighted in this narrative, Webel concludes with an attractive appeal for a reason that aspires within history from the procedural towards the substantive, but with a chastened 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 supports 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 specialists as a thoughtful reading.