Mathew Humphrey

Animal rights protest and the challenge to deliberative democracy

Abstract Political theorists are increasingly investigating the tensions between the ideal of deliberative democracy and the practices of radical political activists. This paper seeks to contribute to that debate by analysing deliberative democrats’ disagreements with one particular group of political protestors – animal rights activists. The paper concentrates on two major areas of contention between these two groups: the idea of politics as a process of levying costs on opponents and the idea of a moral economy of disagreement. We then examine the circumstances of deliberation, suggesting that problems with the use of ideal theory as a standard against which to judge existing practice. The paper concludes by arguing that, despite recent amendments by its proponents, deliberative democracy remains an overly prescriptive approach to democratic politics.

(De)contesting ideology: The struggle over the meaning of the struggle over meaning

In this essay I seek to re‐examine the ‘what is ideology?’ question in the light of recent developments in ideology theory. We see that contemporary ideology theory tends to employ either a ‘restrictive’ or an ‘inclusive’ conception of ideology. Most theorists operating in the field of ideology study see these two approaches as both rival and exclusive. Furthermore the relationship between the analyst of ideology and the ideological field is at issue in both cases. I argue that the concept/conception distinction allows us to discern that these two approaches do not merely employ rival conceptions of the same concept. There are two concepts of ideology at work here, which perform such radically different roles that their coexistence can be seen as unproblematic, reflecting the presence of both normative and interpretative work in social science.

Democratic Legitimacy, Public Justification and Environmental Direct Action

This article addresses the question of whether environmental direct action against policies or institutions that are recognised as democratically legitimate can be justified. Arguments that seek to tie environmental outcomes to stipulated requirements of either the democratic process or distributive theories of justice are found wanting in this regard. However, one of the central justifications for the losers in a democratic settlement accepting defeat is policy reversibility. The non-reversible element in significant areas of environmental change entails that environmentalists are forced to play a ‘one-shot’ political strategy. This fact lends support to the justification of environmental direct action in such cases, although it may also apply beyond the sphere of environmental politics.

Reassessing Ecology and Political Theory

. Themost important project currently under way in environmental politicalphilosophy is the reconstruction of a positive environmental agenda whichis cognisant of the various critiques of green political thought that have beenarticulated since the ‘first wave’ of green literature in the 1960s and 70s.The context of, and justification for, this edited collection is best providedby a brief intellectual history.From the 1960s, green political thought (and environmentally inclinedpolitical thought more generally) has had its own developmental history. Tosay that there have been ‘three waves’ of literature is inevitably to simplifyconsiderably, but this characterisation also captures an important truth. If wetake Rachel Carson’s

Authenticity and Consumption

This chapter explores discourses about authenticity in relation to mass-produced objects and their consumption. We analyse authenticity as a positional good, used to demarcate difference from other consumer practices, and explore instances where consumers use manufactured objects as props for experiences and performances for the purpose of ‘self-authentication’. Some of these are located in distinctive milieus or subcultures of consumption, while others can be found at the heart of ‘mainstream’ consumer culture. We analyse the mutually constitutive relationship between ‘functionalism’ and authentic consumption, from the beginnings of industrial mass production to the present, under totalitarian as well as democratic regimes, and trace the roots of functionalism to the Greek notion of ‘appropriateness’ as a moral good.

The Nature of Authenticity, and the Authenticity of Nature

The idea that an authentic life is one lived in, or according to, ‘nature’ is a common and recurring theme in Western traditions of thought. We begin here with the account of the Fall in early modern Protestantism, and look at how both natural science and the creation of botanical or landscape gardens were conceived as a route to at least partial redemption. Landscape gardens in turn reproduced landscape painting, as ‘nature’ was rendered in idealised form in order to provide a truly authentic and immersive experience. We then examine pre- and non-Christian sources for framing authentic life in nature—‘noble savages’ and pagan rites, as well as the idea of ‘wilderness’ and its importance for the contemporary radical ecology movement.

Living in an Inauthentic Society

How can the individual live authentically in a society steeped in inauthenticity? This question received particularly acute analysis from philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Martin Heidegger, as well as the Existentialists inspired by the latter. In this chapter, we examine these ideas, but we focus on how they were received and adapted by individuals and groups who drew on them to engage with experiments in authentic living. There is another authenticity discourse that asks how society and its environment can be made true to the promise of modern technology and governance, and how weak, irrational humanity can also be remoulded into a new form that will integrate with the possibilities of the future. This notion of authenticity is not only deployed by totalitarian regimes, but also has its liberal manifestations.

Book review: John Schwartzmantel Ideology and Politics, Sage: London, 2008; 198 pp.: 9781412919722, £67 (hbk); 9781412919739, £22.99, (pbk)

new beginnings’ (p. 267). As Balakrishnan points out: ‘Machiavelli’s writings are reflections on a politico-ontological problem regarding how to bring new things into being and make them endure’ (p. 272). This insight enables Balakrishnan to offer a fresh perspective on Machiavelli’s thought in both The Prince and The Discourses. In this view, Machiavelli’s achievement is to focus politics on an understanding of finitude (which anticipates Western exceptionalism), rather than on a cyclical vision of time in which corrupt worlds are periodically destroyed (pp. 276–278). It is here that the possibilities of origination rather than mere repetition and forgetting are opened up. And it is here that the world understood as myth and fate is replaced by a world understood through the category of hope. This essay really captures the imagination, and the numerous suggestions in it could easily bear more discussion and substantiation. One gets the sense that there is something original here—something that needs to be said. But in a strange reflection of the essay itself, both in terms of its content and its place at the end of a collection of reproduced reviews, this can only be done by moving away from a repetition of the past. In this essay above all others, Balakrishnan seems to be wrestling with the problems not only of our time, but with the political itself. It would be worthwhile to see this particular agon played-out in a much fuller way. In summary, there is a disjuncture here between the aims of Antagonistics and its methods. The overall problems it raises are both pressing and deep. Its method is to generate answers through skirmishes with the positions of others. This is a start, and perhaps also a response to the need to find answers in a world in which system seems impossible. However, reviews tend to be fleeting by nature, living in the shadow of the occasion of their birth. Despite the fluttering insights of the final essay, the reviews here are rather like a Victorian butterfly collection, appearing pinned down, and having lost what made them alive when they first appeared. There is something to see—but it is no substitute for a careful and holistic exploration of life expressed in the complexity of its environment.

Seeing is believing? Aesthetics and the politics of the environment

For all that environmental campaigners may invoke science and abstract ethical arguments in support of their claims, the politics of the environment are, inevitably, closely connected to how human beings perceive the natural world, and in particular how any part of that world is ‘viewed’. The preservation of natural environments, through, for example, the creation of national parks, has historically been easiest for those parts of the natural world that human beings (or at least enough and sufficiently powerful of them) considered sublime, picturesque, or beautiful. All the more difficult to secure the preservation of a marsh or coastal delta that appears ‘boring’, ‘dull’ or like a ‘wasteland’. The three books under consideration here reflect upon the relationship between the natural world and the human senses (usually, but not only, the sense of sight). Although each has a very different focus, there are some common thematic elements that demonstrate pervasive concerns across different aspects of what we might call the aesthetics of environmental politics. As to the variations in focus, Finis Dunaway’s Natural visions is a history of the ways in which visual images – in photography and film – have shaped perceptions of, and therefore the politics of, the natural world. The coverage is both episodic (the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the 1960s) and very much Environmental Politics Vol. 17, No. 1, February 2008, 138–146

Environmentalism, fairness, and public reasons

This paper examines the recent ‘deliberative turn’ in environmental political thought with particular regard to demands concerning the employment of public reason in democratic deliberation. Working from John Rawls’ account of the three essential elements of deliberative democracy, the paper assesses the scope for bringing environmental claims within the remit of public reason, and revisits the ‘unfairness to novel reasons’ objection against public reason, as articulated by Jeremy Waldron and then criticised by Lawrence Solum. I argue for a contextual view of political justification. The unfairness objection is found to hold in an attenuated form, and disbarring non‐public reasons from decisiveness in political justification, even on a wide view of public political culture, imposes an arbitrary unfairness on those, such as environmental activists, seeking to challenge widely shared, but possibly misguided, beliefs.