Banana Republic

Abstract

SUCKER THAT I AM for outlandish yet intriguing works of political theory, it serves me right to serve as commentator for the piece Simian Sovereignty. The authors ingeniously invite us to resituate state-of-nature theorizing into a contemporary context, and along the way they provide us with a delightful Rorschach test for unsettling and reviewing some of our basic assumptions about rights, sovereignty, international relations, identity, not to mention academic theorizing. Immodestly proposing an Israel for apes, they proffer wildly clever arguments urging us to take seriously the notion that we should treat our primate kinsfolk as political equals. The time is ripe, they declare, for peeling back our human chauvinism and for extending our slippery slope political traditions to nearby brutes and beasts, and in the meantime maybe we can reclaim the animal within ourselves. It makes some sense. Were it a spoof, however, I would take more pleasure in its entertainment value-and much depends here on the nit-picking distinction between monkey business and monkeying around. The piece displays the tortured ambivalence-the binaries and bifurcations-of an insider's critique of liberalism. It assumes that apes are (or want to be) liberals and uses that do-gooding declaration as a platform on which to reproach and yet reform the liberal tradition, a critique more from within than without. The argument in a nutshell is that natural rights declarations have always been shadowed by their own seemingly naturalist exclusions, typically women, savages, children, slaves, and infidels. In hindsight (no pun intended), we can now see that apes should be included in that liberal legacy of contractual occlusion and eventual vindication. The authors point out that there are even historical precedents for declaring new frontier rights for brutes, from 1792 to 1993. Whereas earlier declarations were viewed satirically and derisively, certain academic and global trends now behoove us, the