Animal Rights: A Historical Anthology

Andrew Linzey and Paul Barry Clarke

Paper, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13421-7
$26.50 / £15.50

March, 2005
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13420-0
$70.50 / £41.50

Animal rights sounds like a modern idea, but in fact—for over three millennia—philosophers, theologians, and political theorists have grappled with the question of our obligations toward animals. This comprehensive and diverse anthology, the only one of its kind, illuminates the complex evolution of moral thought regarding animals and includes writings from ancient Greece to the present. Animal Rights reveals the ways in which a variety of thinkers have addressed such issues as our ethical responsibilities for the welfare of animals, whether animals have rights, and what it means to be human.

The preface by Andrew Linzey dispels many of the misconceptions about the animal rights movement. In light of the growing interest in animal rights, this volume is an indispensable resource for scholars and activists alike.

Animal Rights includes writings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Kant, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Peter Singer.

Related Subjects

• Animal Studies
• Ethics
• Philosophy

About the Author

Andrew Linzey is a member of the Faculty of Theology, Oxford University, and Bede Jarrett Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars. He is also honorary professor in theology at Birmingham University and special professor at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. He has written or edited twenty books, including Aninal Theology, Animal Rites: Liturgies of Animal Care, and Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics. Paul Barry Clarke, as a teacher and researcher in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, has written and edited over twelve books in political philosophy. He is the author of Autonomy Unbound, Deep Citizenship, and Citizenship, and has recently coedited and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought.

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