The Politics of the Human

An elegant and forceful argument that represents the claim to equality as central to the meaning of being human.

Anne Phillips (Author)

9781107093973, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 March 2015

157 pages
22.3 x 14.4 x 1.3 cm, 0.29 kg

'… an insightful, engaging examination of various dimensions of 'the human' as related to contemporary politics. Phillips astutely lays out the important normative and legal work that categorizations of humanness perform - in the extension of rights or asylum, in creating justifications for humanitarian intervention, and so on. However, her primary task is to draw attention to some of the inadequacies in the way that contemporary understandings of the human have been defined and their political implications. In an impressively accessible and wide-ranging analysis, she resists defining the human substantively according to some description of shared, essential features, tracing the problems with such an understanding. At the same time, she resists a bland account of the human rooted in abstract notions that might paper over powerful markers of difference based on gender, race, religion, sexual identity, and the like. … Throughout, her analysis is provocative and richly detailed while managing to retain lucidity and striking clarity. … Recommended.' R. W. Glover, Choice

The human is a central reference point for human rights. But who or what is that human? And given its long history of exclusiveness, when so many of those now recognised as human were denied the name, how much confidence can we attach to the term? This book works towards a sense of the human that does without substantive accounts of 'humanity' while also avoiding their opposite – the contentless versions that deny important differences such as race, gender and sexuality. Drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt's anti-foundationalism, Phillips rejects the idea of 'humanness' as grounded in essential characteristics we can be shown to share. She stresses instead the human as claim and commitment, as enactment and politics of equality. In doing so, she engages with a range of contemporary debates on human dignity, humanism, and post-humanism, and argues that none of these is necessary to a strong politics of the human.

Acknowledgements
1. The politics of the human
2. Humans, with content and without
3. On not justifying equality: Rorty and Arendt
4. Dignity and equality
5. Humanism and post-humanism
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Social theory [JHBA], History of ideas [JFCX], Social & cultural history [HBTB]