How does science work for anthropocentrism? Or, perhaps this inquiry is more accurately formulated like this: how does anthropocentrism coerce science into legitimating it? Since reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in my junior year of high school, I have pondered the relationships between human and non-human animals every day, particularly as they are conceived in this globally dominant anthropocentric view. Though he was not some devoted champion of ecocentrism, it was a passage from Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition that most recently reinvigorated this line of thinking. But before I respond directly, it is necessary first to lay a thorough groundwork upon which we will then situate the inquiry.

In 1890 Alfred Marshall published the Principles of Economics and, following the gradual birth of the rebranded and newly restricted field of economics,2 he decisively snipped the umbilical cord that had once tied it to political economy. This intentional act of tearing economics away from disciplines like sociology, political science, and international relations then reverberated across geographical and temporal borders, allowing economics—in conjun- ction with the full-fledged forces of a robust, highly industrialized capitalism—to in many ways effectively archaicize once-central concerns about ethics. With this backdrop we understand why those works—like The Postmodern Condition—that sought to pop the bubble of economics and restring its connections to the world-at-large are crucial in the project of uncovering the various truths obscured in the fragmentation of disciplines and their related conceptions.