Animal Laws and the Politics of Life: Slaughterhouse Regulation in Germany, 1870-1917
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Shai Lavi
What makes modern law and politics modern? What makes the question of "modernity" so central to our understanding of contemporary law and politics? To offer one possible answer to these questions this study examines the changing relationship between animals and humans and, more specifically, the new regulation of the slaughterhouse in turn of the century Germany. If humans and animals meet in the modern agora it is neither because animals are now perceived as more human-like, as champions of progress would have it, nor because humans are perceived as more animal-like, as critics of modernity would suggest. Rather, both animals and humans have undergone a radical transformation, which has put them on the same plane. If life is that which humans and animals share in common, and politics is that which sets them apart, the history of animal laws suggests that modernity entails the radical transformation of both life and politics. This Article strives to understand this change through the transformation of both politics and life into processes, i.e., into that which can be scientifically known and thus manipulated. The different strategies of reformers of slaughtering as well as their opponents are analyzed in light of this fundamental transformation.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Article
- Introduction
- Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes About International Law and Globalization
- Aristotle on Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law
- In the Blind Spot: The Hybridization of Contracting
- The Shuffle of Things: Law and Knowledge in "Modern Society"
- Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
- The Two-State Solution: Providence and Catastrophe
- "What Are the Gods to Us Now?": Secular Theology and the Modernity of Law
- Transformations of Kinship and the Acceleration of History Thesis
- Animal Laws and the Politics of Life: Slaughterhouse Regulation in Germany, 1870-1917
- The Critical Modernism of Hannah Arendt
- Modern Times: Law, Temporality and Happiness in Hobbes, Locke and Bentham
- Time and Law
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Article
- Introduction
- Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes About International Law and Globalization
- Aristotle on Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law
- In the Blind Spot: The Hybridization of Contracting
- The Shuffle of Things: Law and Knowledge in "Modern Society"
- Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
- The Two-State Solution: Providence and Catastrophe
- "What Are the Gods to Us Now?": Secular Theology and the Modernity of Law
- Transformations of Kinship and the Acceleration of History Thesis
- Animal Laws and the Politics of Life: Slaughterhouse Regulation in Germany, 1870-1917
- The Critical Modernism of Hannah Arendt
- Modern Times: Law, Temporality and Happiness in Hobbes, Locke and Bentham
- Time and Law
