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1 1 Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (Cambridge University Press, 2015). For a recent analysis, see Daniel Chernilo, Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

2 2 Marcus Morgan, Pragmatic Humanism: On the Nature and Value of Sociological Knowledge (Routledge, 2016), ch. 2. Morgan also enumerates some seven responses to this recurrent death of man/humanity/humanism.

3 3 See John Dewey, ‘What Humanism Means to Me’, in Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 5: 1929–1939 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. xxxi.

4 4 See Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 20ff.

5 5 William Du Bois and R. Dean Wright provide an overview of the development in the USA in ‘What is Humanistic Sociology?’, The American Sociologist, 33/4 (Winter 2002): 5–36. In its earliest days it was associated especially with Florian Znaniecki, Charles Cooley, Margaret Mead, Jane Addams and Charles Wright Mills.

6 6 Identified mainly with some of the Frankfurt School intellectuals, such as Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson and even Theodor Adorno in some of his work. See for example, Kieran Durkin, The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

7 7 See Introduction, note 4.

8 8 Louis Menand provides an outstanding history of early pragmatism in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (HarperCollins, 2001). He discusses, among others, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Jane Addams and John Dewey. Of the later pragmatists, see Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (Basic Books, 1975).

9 9 Alfred McClung Lee, Sociology for Whom? (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 44–5.

10 10 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Penguin, 2003 [1978]), p. xx; see also Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Palgrave, 2004).

11 11 More recently, sociologist Daniel Chernilo, in Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2017), has approached the problem another way. With a careful scrutiny of major theorists from just one particular discipline (sociology), he shows how humanist ideas – like responsibility (Hans Jonas), reflexivity (Margaret Archer) and language (Jürgen Habermas) – develop in their work. Here, a multiplicity of key words for humanity could be traced back to such discussions.

12 12 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Allen Lane, 2018).

13 13 See Pankaj Mishra, ‘Grand Illusion’, New York Review of Books, 19 November 2020, pp. 31–2.

14 14 A small sampling of this work, which I draw on here, includes: Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Polity, 2007); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Paradigm, 2014) and The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Duke University Press, 2018); Bernd Reiter, Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2018); Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, A World of Many Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018); Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2020).

15 15 See de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South, p. 164.

16 16 Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, trans. John Willett (Methuen, 1986), p. 108.

17 17 For some of this debate, see Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, eds, Secularization and the World Religions (Liverpool University Press, 2009); Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religions and World Politics (Eeerdmans, 1999).

18 18 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Black Swan, 2006); Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Atlantic Books, 2007).

19 19 The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, ed. Andrew Copson and A. C. Grayling (2015), brings together more than twenty contributors. There is a wonderful opening essay, which outlines many main features of humanism today. It is also made very clear that the anti-religious definition is the real definition of humanism. Stephen Law’s Humanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010) also takes this view. See also Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism (Yale University Press, 2014).

20 20 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Vintage, 2011), p. 465.

21 21 See Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen, Wonders of the Universe (HarperCollins, 2011), p. 241.

22 22 See John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (Allen Lane, 2018). With a long history he suggests that secular humanism is only one version of atheism and the least substantial.

23 23 See Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (New York University Press, 2008).

24 24 See Pew Research Center, ‘The Changing Global Religious Landscape’, 5 April 2017: https://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/

25 25 Ulrich Beck, A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence (Polity, 2010).

26 26 See Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego and John Soboslai, God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society (University of California Press, 2015). See also Michael Jordan, In the Name of God: Violence and Destruction in the World’s Religions (Sutton Publishing, 2006); Oliver Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Ros Schwartz (Hurst, 2010).

27 27 Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds, Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (Continuum, 1993).

28 28 See Sandy and Jael Bharat, A Global Guide to Interfaith: Reflections from Around the World (O Books, 2007). An illustration of this at work can be found in Kwok Pui-Lan, Globalization, Gender and Peacebuilding: The Future of Interfaith Dialogue (Paulist Press, 2012).

29 29 Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011); Daisaku Ikeda, A New Humanism (Tauris, 2010); Felix Unger and Daisaku Ikeda, The Humanist Principle: On Compassion and Tolerance (Tauris, 2016).

30 30 Beck, A God of One’s Own, p. 197.

31 31 See ‘For Darwin Day, 6 Facts About the Evolution Debate’: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day/; 18 per cent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans have always existed in their present form.

32 32 See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury, 2014).

33 33 David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford University Press, 2018); Steven Rose, Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene (Vintage, 2005); Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017).

34 34 Cox and Cohen, Wonders of the Universe, p. 3.

35 35 Compare the rather sober Martin Rees, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2018) with the rather extravagant Michio Kaku, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth, 2nd edn (Penguin, 2019).

36 36 This is a key argument in both Cox and Cohen, Wonders of the Universe, and Harari, Sapiens.

37 37 This is life during the age of AI and more. See sociologist Steve Fuller’s Humanity 2.0: What It Means to be Human, Past, Present and Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and physicist Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Allen Lane, 2017).

38 38 See, for example, Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science (Fourth Estate, 2020); Jonathan Marks, Is Science Racist? (Polity, 2017).

39 39 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 105; see also Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Routledge, 2011).

40 40 Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman, A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering (University of California Press, 2016), p. 196.

41 41 See the history by Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press, 2013). More widely, it is captured well in Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Polity, 2010), and Natan Sznaider’s The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). For a much more critical appraisal, see Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011).

42 42 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York Review of Books, 1950), cited in David J. Rothman, ‘The State as Parent’, in Willard Gaylin, ed., Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence (Random House, 1978), p. 72.

43 43 Tony Vaux, The Selfish Altruist (Earthscan, 2001), p. 203.

44 44 Philip Cunliffe, Cosmopolitan Dystopia: International Intervention and the Fall of the West (Manchester University Press, 2020).

45 45 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, p. 3. A useful lecture given by Fassin, ‘Critique of Humanitarian Reason’, can be found at https://video.ias.edu/critique-of-humanitarian-reason.

46 46 It can be found at https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.

47 47 See two very positive evaluations of human rights by Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (Norton, 2013), and Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2017).

48 48 See Lawrence M. Friedman, The Human Rights Culture: A Study in History and Context (Quid Pro, 2011).

49 49 See William F. Felice, Taking Suffering Seriously: The Importance of Collective Human Rights (State University of New York Press, 1996).

50 50 For example: although indigenous rights may be officially recognized, in practice many problems remain. See Colin Samson, The Colonialism of Human Rights: Ongoing Hypocrisies of Western Liberalism (Polity, 2020). Similar problems remain for each category listed in this Box.

51 51 Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013), p. ix; see also Cunliffe, Cosmopolitan Dystopia; Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Belknap, 2019). Hopgood distinguishes between human rights (lower case) as grounded activism, which is important and will always be with us, and a Human Rights (upper case) – a large global structure more like a worldwide church, of which he is very critical. By contrast, Alison Brysk provides the positive case for rights in The Future of Human Rights (Polity, 2018).

52 52 See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2007).

53 53 See Robert W. Fuller and Pamela A. Gerloff, Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism (Berrett-Koehler, 2008).

54 54 Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 435. Smith argues that it is impossible not to be an essentialist. There is always an essential core hanging around somewhere or we could not even talk about such things. He builds his personalist account (a theory held by a distinctive group of largely Catholic theorists) with dignity and agentic human purpose at the core. See also Chapter 4 of Phillips, The Politics of the Human for a critical commentary of essentialist ideas of dignity. Maria Kronfeldner’s What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept (MIT Press, 2018) is a rigorous and systematic philosophical development of modern non-essentialist ideas around human nature.

55 55 Martha C. Nussbaum’s ideas can be found in, especially, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard University Press, 1998); Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Harvard University Press, 2011). Much of her recent work is concerned with taking seriously the importance of emotions in social, ethical and political life. For examples, see, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2004); Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Harvard University Press, 2006); and Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Harvard University Press, 2013).

56 56 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xv.

57 57 This idea is well detailed and discussed in the writings of Deborah Lupton; see her The Quantified Self (Polity, 2016); and Data Selves (Polity, 2020).

58 58 See David Roden’s Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge, 2015), esp ch. 1. I have drawn mainly on Rosi Braidotti’s three key works: The Posthuman (Polity, 2013); Posthuman Knowledge (Polity, 2019); and, with Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary (Bloomsbury, 2018).

59 59 Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 65.

60 60 See Cunliffe, Cosmopolitan Dystopia.

61 61 Braidotti and Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary.

62 62 E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 22.

63 63 José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2013).

64 64 There are many precedents for thinking about connectedness. The early work of Carol Gilligan was very influential – e.g., ‘Hearing the Difference: Theorizing Connection’, Hypatia, 10/2 (1995): 120–7; but see also Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury, 2014), and, on relationality, Nick Crossley, Toward Relational Sociology (Routledge, 2011).

65 65 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959).

66 66 A wonderful book for children used in primary schools asks us to ‘imagine if the world were a village’ – children often learn the shape of the world through tales of comparative size. See David J. Smith and Shelagh Armstrong, If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World’s People, 2nd edn (Bloomsbury, 2011).

67 67 Richard Sennett has written an elegant account of the importance of this process in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Penguin, 2013) – part of his trilogy of works on ‘homo faber’ and the ‘skills people need to sustain everyday life’ (p. ix).