Ted Benton

University of Essex · Department of Sociology

The December 2018 issue of Monthly Review featured John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark's "Marx and Alienated Speciesism" and Christian Stache's "On the Origins of Animalist Marxism: Rereading: Ted Benton and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," both of which take up Ted Benton's work on animals and Marxism. Here Ted Benton offers a re...

An extended historical and philosophical argument, this book will be a valuable text for all students of the philosophy of the social sciences. It discusses the serious alternatives to positivist and empiricist accounts of the physical sciences, and poses the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism in the social sciences in new terms. Recent...

Peter Dickens has a near-unique ability to take up and see what is valuable in each new intellectual fashion, while never being carried away as a ‘dedicated follower’. While some of us might deride the latest continental import as old wine in new bottles, or as mere rhetoric dressed up as knowledge, Dickens patiently shows how something can be draw...

The chapter begins by noting and exploring some of the great complexity of the uses of the term "nature". Uses of the concept of nature to characterise "internal" human nature are briefly discussed before the focus turns to social scientific approaches to "external" nature, and to the relationships between human social life and its non-human condit...

Since 1972, the journal Radical Philosophy has provided a forum for the discussion of radical and critical ideas in philosophy. It is the liveliest and probably the most widely read philosophical journal in Britain. This anthology reprints some of the best articles to have appeared in the journal during the past five years. It covers topics in soci...

Sodobiology and the Preemption of Social Science, Alexander Rosenberg

The Grey Bush-cricket Platycleis albopunctata was rediscovered at Colne Point Nature Reserve in 2004 in pitfall traps after an absence of sightings since the early 1900s. Since its rediscovery it has been found most years in the sand dunes opposite the reserve car park. However, in 2010, nymphs were commonly seen around the reserve car park in Lee-...

The thoughts of Darwin and Wallace on human evolution and the relations between humans and the rest of nature are compared. Despite significant differences, it is suggested both great evolutionists have much to offer in addressing our current socio-ecological predicament.

The Orthoptera of three military training areas near Colchester in Essex have been surveyed since 1980. Two locally scarce orthopterans were recorded: Mottled Grasshopper Myrmeleotettix maculatus Thunberg and Great Green Bush-cricket Tettigonia viridissima L. M. maculatus is a bare earth specialist and can be classed as disturbance-dependent, where...

Some writings by Alan Holland provide the starting point for an exploration of sources of environmental value in human social practices. It is argued that many practices both serve human purposes and also provide a setting for the emergence of environmental value. Such practices are ones in which activity is embedded in, and so both strongly constr...

Redirected attention has been given to rural society and the key linkages between rural and urban politics in recent decades, which is accentuated by the Countryside Alliance. One important issue is the aesthetic and ethical concerns revolving around the industrialized food system and other issues like food safety, animal welfare and rights agitati...

Perlo's engagement with the complex and ambiguous relationship between Marxism (and, more broadly, the socialist traditions) and the moral status of animals is very much to be welcomed. This sort of engagement is valuable for three main reasons. First, the more narrowly focused social movement activity—whether committed to animal rights, social jus...

An influential tendency of thought1 in Anglo-Saxon history and sociology of the sciences has argued for a recognition of the essential homogeneity of science and broader features of cultural life. Older traditions of historiography which devoted themselves to an understanding of the inner dynamic of a supposedly autonomous domain of scientific idea...

I am grateful to the editors for inviting me to reply to Paul Burkett's criticisms of my work, and also to Burkett himself for his systematic and scholarly attention. So far as I can tell, Burkett and I are in close agreement on some very important issues: that ecological degradation is of central importance politically, that its primary cause is t...

Contributors to this edited book consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is ‘sustainability’ an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible wi...

It is now widely recognized that members of other animal species and the rest of non-human nature urgently need to be protected from destructive human activities. This article evaluates the case for extending the moral and legal scope of rights as a strategy for achieving these aims. It suggests that we require a more pluralistic approach to the mo...

Louis Althusser was a Marxist philosopher and social theorist. He was certainly the most influential Marxist thinker of his time, and one of the most influential social theorists working in any tradition. Essays written by him in the 1960s had the greatest and most long-lasting impact. He continued to publish through the 1970s, becoming increasingl...

Marxists have responded slowly and uncertainly to the rise of ecological politics since the 1970s. Some have seized on the ‘Limits to Growth’ debate as confirming classical Marxist expectations that capitalism would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Others have burrowed back into the writings of Marx and Engels to disc...

At the beginning of 1995, amidst unprecedented government unpopularity, accusations of widespread corruption, high levels of unemployment, commercialisation of health care, and threats to valued public services, the UK political system was suddenly rocked by an explosion of protest action — over the export of calves. The Financial Times took the th...

"Two British authors (Hambler and Speight 1995) have recently advanced the provocative thesis that science should replace 'tradition' in wildlife conservation. The implication in this is that science somehow is able to provide an objective account of what biodiversity is and how it should best be managed. Against this view, a consensus among social...

In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of 'human rights'. Liberal-individualist views of human rights and the advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether humans or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnera...

This paper is programmatic in its intent. I have avoided extensive literature-citations and, in some areas, resorted to rather tendentious assertion rather than thorough argumentation. My purpose is to `place on the table' a project for re-conceptualising the relationship between sociology (together with related social science disciplines) and the...

Since 1987, the environment has exploded onto the national and international agendas in a way which few would have predicted. The environment is now seen as a crucial electoral issue, ranking alongside the economy, defence and the health service. A token of its newfound political importance is the emphasis now placed upon it by Margaret Thatcher. H...

The topic of my talk is a very ancient one indeed. It bears upon the place of humankind in nature, and upon the place of nature in ourselves. I shall, however, be discussing this range of questions in terms which have not always been available to the philosophers of the past when they have asked them. When we ask these questions today we do so with...

The Althusserian project of rigorous problematisation and reconstruction of some of the most basic concepts and propositions of historical materialism was bound to have enormously wide-ranging implications. In fields of debate where Marxist positions were already well established, in conflict both among themselves and against rival theories, the im...

For Althusser, as we have seen, Marxist philosophy, or Theory (with a capital ‘T’) was supposed to be an indispensable means for any adequate interpretation of the works of Marx (or, indeed, any other text). In order, then, to establish the principles and methods of Marxist philosophy it is first necessary to employ them. Althusser recognises the c...

Althusser’s central project in his philosophical writings of the early and mid 1960s, as we have seen, was the recovery and development of a Marxist philosophy. This is seen not simply as an end in itself, but as a means of drawing a boundary between the Marxist science of history, historical materialism, on the one hand, and the various epistemolo...

Vincent Descombes, seeing in Althusser’s later philosophical position an abandonment of the attempt to give Marxism an epistemological foundation, argues that with this the Althusserian undertaking is brought to ‘an official close’.1 I do not think the position is so simple as this, but there is no doubt that others, several of whom had shared the...

The year 1967 marks the beginning of a period of self-critical activity in which Althusser takes his distance from some, though not all, of the concepts and theses of his essays of the early and mid — sixties. In the course of these self-criticisms, new theoretical positions emerge. As we shall see, these ‘new’ positions sometimes are genuinely new...

The preoccupations of Althusser’s writing during this early period remain philosophical: the elaboration of conceptions of knowledge, of science and its contrast with ideology, of dialectics, totality and historical causality. These philosophical ideas and themes are, as we have seen, set to work in an attempted periodisation of Marx’s work. This p...

In this chapter I shall be discussing some of the new directions in political theory and analysis which have been made possible by Althusser’s work. Obviously the scope here is potentially enormous, so again I shall be very selective. The main criterion of selection I shall use will be the bearing of Althusserian political theory on the prospects f...

Like many other socialists of my generation, my own ideas and political activities have been influenced over the last decade and a half by the ideas and arguments presented in this book, sometimes beneficially, sometimes in ways that I now regret. So much a part of everyday life have they become that, when I was approached with the idea of writing...

The subjects of my last chapter were those critical rejections of Althusserian Marxism, and sometimes of Marxism itself, which had as their starting-point positions internal to Althusserianism or, at least, in other tendencies of thought which shared with it important common sources and assumptions. My concern in this chapter will be with a series...

In the first section of this paper I note a parallel between certain problems generated by Steven Lukes's `three-dimensional' view of power, and what I call the `paradox of emancipation' in certain traditions of Marxist thought. Lukes's critique of what he calls the `one' and `two-dimensional' views of power is next reviewed, and Lukes's own `three...