Steven Best Biography
Influential Animal Right Activists
Steven Best
Born: December 1955
Education: Ph.D. in philosophy (1993)
Occupation: Associate Professor of Humanities
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Introduce Steven Best
Steven Best (born December 1955) is an American philosopher, writer, speaker and activist. His concerns include animal rights, species extinction, human overpopulation, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media and culture, globalization, and capitalist domination. He is Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has published 13 books and over 200 articles and reviews.
He is co-author (with UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner) of a trilogy of postmodern studies (Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogation; The Postmodern Turn: Paradigms Shifts in Art, Theory, and Science; and The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (Guilford Press, 1991, 1997, 2001). More recently, he introduced and co-edited four anthologies: Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Lantern Books, 2004); Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006); Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic-Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2010); and The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination (Rowman & Littlefield 2011). His most recent book is titled: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Field Academic
A writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education described Best in 2005 as "one of the leading scholarly voices on animal rights."
Inside Activism Best is an advocate of Inclusive Democracy, a movement founded by Greek political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos, and sits on the international advisory board of the International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He writes:
In bold contrast to the limitations of the animal advocacy movement (AAM) and all other reformist causes, Takis Fotopoulos advances a broad view of human dynamics and social institutions, their impact on the earth, and the resulting consequences for society itself. Combining anti-capitalist, radical democracy, and ecological concerns in the concept of "ecological democracy," Fotopoulos defines this notion as "the institutional framework which aims at the elimination of any human attempt to dominate the natural world, in other words, as the system which aims to reintegrate humans and Nature. This implies transcending the present 'instrumentalist' view of Nature, in which Nature is seen as an instrument for growth, within a process of endless concentration of power.
