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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Politics of the Human
  • Cited by 45
  • Anne Phillips, London School of Economics and Political Science
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781316145555
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316145555
Subjects:
Political Theory, History, Politics and International Relations, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
The Seeley Lectures
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

‘Anne Phillips’ book is a hugely engaging critique of both descriptive and abstract accounts of the human as a basis for contemporary politics.’

J. M. Browne - University of Cambridge

‘This is a brilliant and incisive intervention into contemporary political conceptions of the value of the human. Phillips persuasively rebuts widely accepted arguments about grounding a substantive notion of the human in dignity, an essence, or on scientific evidence. The Politics of the Human does not deal in abstractions or evade the question of embodied power. Rather, it seeks to affirm equality in and through human difference. These innovative and engaging lectures show how the affirmation of difference is required if we are to see that equality is a political creation and achievement rather than something discovered through argument or reason.’

Moira Gatens - University of Sydney

‘Anne Phillips writes in a humane and even-handed way about how to understand the human, now: as status or claim? Drawing on a wide range of authors, from Arendt to Habermas, Butler to Bennett, Phillips builds a compelling case for the human as claim. Whether readers agree with her or not, none will come away unimpressed by the warmth and clarity of her vision in these Seeley lectures.’

Bonnie Honig - Brown University, Rhode Island

‘In her compelling and accessible account of the politics of the human as an enactment of our commitment to equality, Anne Phillips decisively liberates political theory from the futile search for the ‘foundations’ of human beings, and in doing so remaps the conceptual terrain of a number of key debates.’

Nicola Lacey - London School of Economics and Political Science

'… 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 Source: Choice

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Contents

Contents
References
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