Writing a Rawlsian book on animal welfare is a particularly thankless task: you are yoked to a via media that is bound to provoke ridicule from those who believe it risible to include animals in the social contract, while you can only frustrate animal rights advocates who expect more robust protection for the non-human world. While ultimately it is not clear that Kimberly Smith's book will convince many of the utility of Rawls's political liberalism for nonhumans, she is to be commended for taking on this fraught task, remedying a significant lacuna in the burgeoning field of animal-related ethics and political theory.

Smith begins with the laudable sentiment that “we need to improve our ability to govern the natural world, to make the world a better, richer, more sustaining habitat for humans and other species” (p. vi), and the book aims to craft a public philosophy based on an “overlapping consensus…. that some animals are members of the social contract” (p. xiv). Smith argues that Americans share a social consensus that animals are entitled to (some) ethical and political consideration, but in framing her project through the later Rawls she hopes to avoid “metaphysical” arguments about the foundations of animal rights—Smith aims to show us the best we can hope for from the overlapping consensus, rather than debating the various moral perspectives (e.g., Peter Singer's utilitarianism) about what animals may deserve. Smith's book is something of an overview of the contemporary scene, with chapters devoted to the themes of animals as potential members of the social contract (she says they are, though they can still be killed for food), as property (she argues they are “mixed goods”—part use, part awe—so factory farming should be curtailed), as subjects of political representation (not as difficult as one might think), and in her final chapter she takes up the particularly political dilemmas of reform (which I will discuss).

Among Smith's contributions I would highlight two: the first concerns her critique of the “ethical extensionism” thesis, which holds that liberal society has seen a progressive extending of the ethico-political community from the eighteenth century to the present, first including slaves, then women, and now including nonhuman animals. Smith rightly points to a much more uneven history, and also one that is more tightly bound up with the emergence of the regulatory state in the nineteenth century. Laws to regulate stray dogs were originally intended to control an animal largely seen as feral, but Smith argues that the effect of these regulations was to confer a new status on dogs, which eventually resulted in “a kind of civic personality” (p. 58). This ironic reversal, which Smith endorses, is connected with the ironies of the second point to highlight: reforms that criminalize animal abuse present special difficulties in the United States. Smith focuses on two prosecutions, of Santeria practitioners for animal sacrifice in Texas and of Michael Vick for animal cruelty stemming from dog-fighting, in order to document the complexity and danger of a liberal multicultural polity using the policing power of the state in order to protect animals. While Smith does not suggest decriminalizing dog-fighting, she argues persuasively that the history of racial oppression through the criminal justice system should make liberals wary of radically extending the coercive powers of the state vis à vis animal abuse, particularly when criminalization has been shown to have so little positive effect (p. 144). Furthermore, she contends, animal rights advocates miss opportunities to advance the very welfare of the animals that they want to protect, by wrongly demonizing Santeria and Vick as instances of barbarism instead of seeing them as valuing a sacred relationship to animals (in Santeria) or as the “misguided animal husbandry” implicit in dog-fighting (p. 146). While it may go too far to say that the goal of law enforcement should be to rehabilitate Vick “as a dog owner” (p. 147), Smith is surely right to direct our attention to the “creative, facilitative state powers” (e.g., improving economic development and social services in dysfunctional communities, p. 152) rather than to focus predominantly on the state capacity for coercion, as we think about how to create more flourishing animal/human communities.

That said, it would be interesting to see Smith comment on the potentially greater intrusion that these facilitative powers pose to liberal subjects, if we were to instead ponder them as biopolitical practices of governmentality rather than merely as forms of beneficent intervention (e.g., Foucault's Discipline and Punish, 1975). It is also unfortunate that Smith does not engage, even in passing, with the emerging literature in Critical Animal Studies, Posthumanism, and New Materialism, much of which would challenge the social consensus on which she relies in unproblematically constructing humans as the ones who “govern” and animals as the objects of governance (see, e.g., Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, 2008, and Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, 2010). More importantly, it is not clear that Smith's liberal theory adds much to the social consensus that already exists, leaving some question as to the value of the project as a whole. As Smith herself notes, while academic liberalism has been largely silent until recently on animal welfare (she is unfortunately unable to comment on Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's compelling liberal vision of animal citizenship, Zoopolis, 2011), there is a fairly robust history of American political institutions taking animal welfare seriously, dating back to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Smith's particular brand of liberalism seems ill-suited to leading the way into the twenty-first century. Her argument moves back and forth freely between liberal principles and “contextual justification” (a method she takes from Don Herzog), but there is little to justify the shifting weight in her argument variously borne by liberal principles of value (Elizabeth Anderson, p. 83), political pragmatism, concepts like “admiration” (p. 65), or the limits imposed by the overlapping consensus (and sometimes she is critical of the consensus, as with dog-fighting, while other times she endorses it, against ethical veganism). She is right to note that abstract principles are not always effective political tools (p. 61), but without additional criteria to judge her argument it is not clear why the background consensus, inconsistent as it is, needs any assistance from her theory.

In her historical summary Smith cites a passage from the 1641 text of the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, which states in part: “No man shall exercise any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use. If any man shall have occasion to leade or drive Cattel from place to place that is far of, so that they be weary, or hungry, or fall sick, or lambe, It shall be lawful to rest or refresh them” (p. 18). I cannot help but feel that this statute, broadly construed as an ethic, goes about as far as would any of Smith's proposed reforms. That is, while Smith's critique of the intense commodification of animals under the current “factory farm” system would certainly have important contemporary ramifications, her suggestions for reform are merely remedies for the horrors brought on by the industrialization and commodification of animal life since the nineteenth century. Smith uses Elizabeth Anderson's notion of “mixed goods”—part commodity, part subject of awe—to criticize CAFOs (p. 83), but those cattle farmers she lauds, like Joel Salatin (made famous by Michael Pollan's Omnivores's Dilemma, 2006), practice a form of animal husbandry that harkens back to our pre-industrial, pre-liberal past. In thinking from the animal's point of view, as Smith claims social contract thinking allows us to do, I suppose that the agrarian past looks pretty good to a modern cow. If you think that liberalism should be able to offer animals something more than a return to the seventeenth century, however, you will find this dissatisfying. While I cannot speak on Smith's behalf, I would say that this return is not true to the best impulses in her own text, as she notes that we can push for “a regulatory structure that aims to build a reasonable, well-considered consensus” (p. 158), which implies that the overlapping consensus she cites to such conservative effect throughout the text is more malleable than it may seem. One wonders what those “creative, facilitative state powers” she documents could do, given Smith's penultimate sentiments as a starting point: “We are all animals, after all; we are all, at some stages in our lives, vulnerable, interdependent, not very rational, and lacking voice and agency” (p. 164). That is a liberalism that might be less thankless, at least by half.

So how might we go about building such a consensus, and where might it be headed? I would first suggest taking a few steps back from Smith's position before we try to take any steps forward. This would mean, as a beginning, that we cannot bracket a discussion of “the question of the animal” as Smith would have us do, because she worries that such a discussion might impinge on many comprehensive doctrines found in liberal multicultural societies. One could have correctly noted the same un-Rawlsian impingements by the advocates of gay marriage two decades ago, but we now see that these advocates helped create and shape the consensus that is (still) emerging today. The same could be said of civil rights activists in the 1960s, environmental activists in the 1970s, and the suffragettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While each of these movements framed their appeal through ideals drawn from the then-current social consensus, each went far beyond anything that could have been considered reasonable (or even likely) at the time.

By avoiding such a discussion—a conversation about the significance of the concept “animal” as it is generally used in opposition to “human”—Smith actually occludes the depth of the political problem faced by nonhuman advocates, and also makes it difficult to get clear on what the goals of such advocacy should be. With respect to occlusion, it is not just that our economy is fundamentally rooted in the exploitation of nonhumans (it is), but that our personal and political identities as humans are wedded to the repeated sacrifice of animality (see Giorgio Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal, 2003). We (seem to) constantly need to validate our worth by suppressing or overcoming “the beast” within and without, and politically we cannot go very far toward ending the exploitation of nonhumans until we see how materially and psychologically attached we are to their submission. As for the problem of goals, without considering whether the term “animal” is itself a kind of conceptual violence, we won't really be able to say (for instance) whether “governing animals” means that we can still eat our humanely-killed fellow contractors (as Smith contends), or instead whether something like veganism should be the ethical and political ideal. Perhaps we should even consider whether we want to still be “human” at all. These conversations will be messy, contentious, and may never provide the kind of consensus that a Rawlsian would find sufficiently overlapping, but there is also no way of saying what the next two centuries (or ten, or twenty) will look like, and no reason to truncate our political imagination in the name of the chimera of stability.

My suggestions for the subsequent political steps forward are thus tentative, in light of the pervasive anthropocentrism of our society. Smith's attention to the ways in which we already acknowledge nonhumans as part of the social contract is welcome; I would suggest that we take these insights farther, along the lines sketched out by posthumanists like Bruno Latour (Politics of Nature, 2004) and deliberative democrats like John Dryzek (Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance, 2010). Latour and Dryzek propose different strategies for politically representing nonhumans more directly, as “actants” (Latour) or “discourses” (Dryzek) in a new kind of “parliament,” and Donaldson and Kymlicka (mentioned earlier) are also helpful in soliciting their readers to think beyond the “negative rights” paradigm propounded by most animal rights theorists. Many natural scientists already argue that nonhumans are agents in the most robust sense of the term (e.g., Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's Autopoiesis and Cognition, 1973), and though American political institutions have been slow to recognize this (unlike, say, the 2008 Ecuadorean constitution that enshrines “the rights of nature”), there are plenty of models for legally and political representing nonhuman agents that we may now draw upon (e.g., the concept of the guardian ad litem).

While there are few immediate prospects for establishing a new egalitarian “collective” of humans and nonhumans, the current American system of federalism provides more opportunities than one might suspect. When Ernest Callenbach wrote the utopian novel Ecotopia in 1975, about the new country formed when Northern California, Oregon, and Washington split off from the United States to found a “green” republic, he may have unwittingly provided a strategic tool for nonhuman advocates in the twenty-first century. While secession is not on the table in any real sense, of course, Callenbach's core idea, that certain areas of the nation are more fertile ground for ecological citizenship than others, may be a helpful (and practical) re-framing device. We have already seen how some states led the way on gay marriage (the same is true of controls on pollution, state-mandated recycling, etc.), and perhaps such a targeted-state approach can provide one strategy for creating the human political will to create more-than-human political institutions. While there is no guarantee that creating a “parliament of things” (to use Latour's term) in Vermont or Oregon will necessarily entail a chain reaction akin to the overturning of DOMA, it is not an unreasonable goal to work toward—indeed the Humane Society is already pursuing something like this in its state-by-state efforts to mandate humane practices of animal husbandry. Sometimes states act as exemplars that others want to emulate, while at other times states act as agents of contagion that introduce a virus (computer or otherwise) which overwhelms the systemic defenses of the whole (this is more the case with DOMA's fall), but in either case the actions of relatively few citizens can have a cascade effect on the larger American polity. Perhaps the best advice for creating a more hospitable consensus for nonhumans, then, is really fairly simple: go Northwest, young posthuman, go Northwest.