Book contents
- Human Dignity and Political Criticism
- Human Dignity and Political Criticism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Part I The Contours of Dignitarian Humanism
- Part II Against Traditional Accounts of Human Dignity
- Part III A Revisionist Approach
- 8 Dignity-Revisionism: Challenges and Opportunities
- 9 Commercial and Human Economies
- 10 Marx on Value and Valorization
- 11 Love and Respect: Attentional Currencies
- 12 Attentional Precedence
- 13 Human Dignity
- 14 After Respect
- 15 Human Dignity and Political Criticism
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - Human Dignity and Political Criticism
from Part III - A Revisionist Approach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2021
- Human Dignity and Political Criticism
- Human Dignity and Political Criticism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Part I The Contours of Dignitarian Humanism
- Part II Against Traditional Accounts of Human Dignity
- Part III A Revisionist Approach
- 8 Dignity-Revisionism: Challenges and Opportunities
- 9 Commercial and Human Economies
- 10 Marx on Value and Valorization
- 11 Love and Respect: Attentional Currencies
- 12 Attentional Precedence
- 13 Human Dignity
- 14 After Respect
- 15 Human Dignity and Political Criticism
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Returning to where we began, consider again B. F. Skinner’s withering dismissal of the “autonomous … inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity.” Like Skinner, this book has urged that we “dispossess” individuals of dignity understood as an innate, occult, inward, quality, or as a fixed juridical status that remains unchanged regardless of how the lives of its bearers actually work out. Yet, where Skinner sought to exorcise dignitarian considerations entirely in order to make room for a program of technocratic social reform, this book has instead tried to reappropriate a revised construal of human dignity as a valid basis for social and political criticism. The revisionist strategy recommended here has accordingly sought to conceptualize human dignity as an external social phenomenon, entrenched (or not) in actual patterns of social interaction, in something like the way that Hobbes and other early theorists of the modern state attempted to construct an account of that institution as the central locus of public concern.
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- Human Dignity and Political Criticism , pp. 239 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021