2 - The Idea of Human Dignity

Summary

This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.