The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization | Tài liệu Tiếng Anh

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEHUMANIZATION
A striking feature of atrocities, as seen in genocides, civil wars, or violence against certain racial
and ethnic groups, is the attempt to dehumanize — to deny and strip human beings of their
humanity. Yet the very nature of dehumanization remains relatively poorly understood.
The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization is the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary ref-
erence source on the subject and an outstanding survey of the key concepts, issues, and debates
within dehumanization studies. Organized into four parts, the Handbook covers the following topics:
• The history of dehumanization from Greek Antiquity to the 20th century, contextualizing the
oscillating boundaries, dimensions, and hierarchies of humanity in the history of the ‘West’;
• How dehumanization is contemporarily studied with respect to special contexts: as part of
social psychology, as part of legal studies or literary studies, and how it connects to the idea of
human rights, disability and eugenics, the question of animals, and the issue of moral standing;
• How to tackle its complex facets, with respect to the perpetrator’s and the target’s perspective,
metadehumanization and selfdehumanization, rehumanization, social death, status and inter-
dependence, as well as the fear we show toward robots that become too human for us;
• Conceptual and epistemological questions on how to distinguish different forms of dehu-
manization and neighboring phenomena, on why dehumanization appears so paradoxical,
and on its connection to hatred, essentialism, and perception.
Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, history, psychology, and anthro-
pology, this Handbook will also be of interest to those in related disciplines, such as politics,
international relations, criminology, legal studies, literary studies, gender studies, disability studies,
or race and ethnic studies, as well as readers from social work, political activism, and public policy.
Maria Kronfeldner is Professor of Philosophy at Central European University (New York -
Vienna - Budapest). She is the author of What’s Left of Human Nature (2018), and Darwinian
Creativity and Memetics (Routledge, 2011). She currently directs ‘The Epistemology of the In/ Human’ project.
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Routledge-Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEHUMANIZATION Edited by Maria Kronfeldner First published 2021 by Routledge
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Title: The Routledge handbook of dehumanization / edited by Maria Kronfeldner.
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Routledge handbooks in philosophy | Includes bibliographical references
and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020027965 (print) | LCCN 2020027966 (ebook) | ISBN
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Subjects: LCSH: Humanity. | Crimes against humanity.
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A stranger on a train, and you’re going down
They’re gonna run you out of this town
I wonder what your story is, why you in the gutter lie
And who it was who ruined you, I wonder why?
(The Tiger Lillies, Devil’s Fairground) v CONTENTS List of contributors x Preface xvi Acknowledgments xviii
1 Introduction: Mapping dehumanization studies 1 Maria Kronfeldner PART I
Oscillating boundaries, dimensions, and hierarchies
of humanity in historical contexts 37
2 Dehumanization before the Columbian exchange 39 Siep Stuurman
3 “Humanity” and its limits in early modern European thought 52 László Kontler
4 Enlightenment humanization and dehumanization, and the orangutan 64 Silvia Sebastiani
5 Dehumanizing the exotic in living human exhibitions 83 Guido Abbattista
6 Dehumanizing strategies in Nazi ideology and their anthropological context 98 Johannes Steizinger vii Contents
7 Theorizing the inhumanity of human nature, 1955-1985 112 Erika Lorraine Milam PART II
Further special contexts of dehumanization 125
8 The social psychology of dehumanization 127 Nick Haslam
9 Dehumanization and the loss of moral standing 145 Edouard Machery
10 Dehumanization and the question of animals 159 Alice Crary
11 Dehumanization, disability, and eugenics 173 Robert A. Wilson
12 Dehumanization and human rights 187 Marie-Luisa Frick 13 Dehumanization by law 201 Luigi Corrias
14 Dehumanization in literature and the figure of the perpetrator 214 Andrea Timár PART III
The complex facets of dehumanization 229
15 Dehumanization and social death as fundamentals of racism 231 Wulf D. Hund
16 How status and interdependence explain different forms of dehumanization 245 Susan T. Fiske
17 Exploring metadehumanization and self-dehumanization from a target perspective 260
Stéphanie Demoulin, Pierre Maurage, and Florence Stinglhamber
18 The dehumanization and rehumanization of refugees 275
Victoria M. Esses, Stelian Medianu, and Alina Sutter viii Contents
19 Motivational and cognitive underpinnings of fear of social
robots that become “too human for us” 292
Maria Paola Paladino, Jeroen Vaes, and Jolanda Jetten PART IV
Conceptual and epistemological questions regarding dehumanization 307
20 Objectification, inferiorization, and projection in phenomenological research on dehumanization 309
Sara Heinämaa and James Jardine
21 Why dehumanization is distinct from objectification 326 Mari Mikkola
22 On hatred and dehumanization 341
Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang
23 Dehumanization, the problem of humanity and the problem of monstrosity 355 David Livingstone Smith
24 Psychological essentialism and dehumanization 362 Maria Kronfeldner
25 Could dehumanization be perceptual? 378 Somogy Varga Index 392 ix CONTRIBUTORS
Guido Abbattista is Professor of Modern History at the University of Trieste (Italy). He is a specialist
in 18th-century historical and political culture in France and in the Anglo-American world, with
special reference to colonial and imperial themes and to the representations of human differences. In
more recent times, he researched on live ethno-exhibitions in early modern Europe and in 19th- and
20th-century Italy and published the books Umanità in mostra. Esposizioni etniche e invenzioni esotiche
in Italia (1880–1940) [Humans on Exhibition: Ethnic Expositions and Exotic Inventions in Italy
(1880–1940)] (Trieste: EUT, 2013), and (edited), Moving Bodies, Displaying Nations: National Cultures,
Race and Gender in World Exhibitions (Nineteenth-Twentieth Century) (Trieste: EUT, 2014).
Thomas Brudholm is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and a philosopher
by training. In addition to emotions and dehumanization, his research interests include hate
crime, genocide, transitional justice, and theory of science and the humanities. He is author of
Resentment’s Virtue (Temple UP 2008) and has coedited several volumes, including Hate, Politics,
Law (Oxford UP 2018); Emotions and Mass Atrocity (Cambridge UP 2018); and The Religious
in Responses to Mass Atrocity (Cambridge UP 2009). Currently, Brudholm is focusing on issues
arising from responses to perceived offenses in the context of higher education.
Luigi Corrias is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
(VU Amsterdam). His research falls broadly within the field of the philosophy of international
law. In particular, he focuses on ethical and philosophical issues pertaining to international crim-
inal law, European integration, and constitutional theory. He is the author of The Passivity of
Law: Competence and Constitution in the European Court of Justice (Springer, 2011), for which the
Netherlands Association for Philosophy of Law awarded him the Prize for the Best Dissertation
in Legal Philosophy in the Netherlands and Belgium, 2009–2010. He is currently engaged in an
ongoing (book) project on humanity and dehumanization in international law.
Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor at the New School for Social Research
(USA) and Visiting Fellow at Regent’s Park College, Oxford (UK). Her books include Beyond
Moral Judgment, Inside Ethics, and edited collections and journal issues on Cavell, Diamond,
Wittgenstein, and ordinary language philosophy. She publishes on topics including social phil-
osophy, moral philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, critical animal studies, critical disability x Contributors
studies, and feminist theory. She is completing a book—Radical Animal—on why attention to
animals is urgently necessary for liberating social thought.
Stéphanie Demoulin is Professor in the Psychology Department at the Université catholique
de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Her two main research interests focus on intergroup
relations and negotiations. Early 2000, she was part of one of the research teams that introduced
the topic of infrahumanization and dehumanization in social psychology. She is the (co)author
of a number of articles published in various scientific journals, such as Personality and Social
Psychology Review, Cognition and Emotion, and Social Cognition. She also coedited (with J.-Ph.
Leyens and J. Dovidio) a book on Intergroup Misunderstandings (Psychology Press), coauthored
another (with V. Yzerbyt) on Intergroup Relations (Presses universitaires de Grenoble), and is the
author of Psychologie de la Négociation (Mardaga).
Victoria M. Esses is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Network for Economic
and Social Trends and of the Centre for Research on Migration and Ethnic Relations at the
University of Western Ontario. She is also Principal Investigator of the Pathways to Prosperity
Partnership, a national alliance of university, community, and government partners dedicated
to fostering welcoming communities and promoting the integration of immigrants in Canada.
Victoria is a Fellow of the CIFAR program Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging.
Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs, at Princeton
University. She investigates social cognition, especially cognitive stereotypes and emotional
prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, and neuroscientific levels. Author of about 400 publications
and winner of numerous scientific awards, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Sponsored by a Guggenheim, her Russell-Sage-Foundation book is Envy Up, Scorn Down: How
Status Divides Us, which is relevant to varieties of dehumanizarion. With Taylor & Francis, she
wrote five editions of a classic graduate text: Social Cognition, and authored, four editions of an
advanced undergraduate text, Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology.
Marie-Luisa Frick is Associated Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Innsbruck, Austria. Her fields of research are political and legal philosophy, and ethics and phil-
osophy of religion with a special emphasis on human rights. In 2016, she was a Visiting Fellow at
Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. She has published in major journals in the field
and has written the monography Human Rights and Relative Universalism (Palgrave 2019).
Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. In add-
ition to dehumanization, on which he published important contributions, his research interests
include stigma, essentialist thinking, psychiatric classification, and the historical development
of psychological concepts. Books authored by him include Introduction to Personality, Individual
Differences and Intelligence (Sage 2017), and Psychology in the Bathroom (Palgrave 2012).
Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 Academy of Finland) and Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä. She specializes in phenomenology, philosophy of mind,
and history of philosophy, and has published extensively in these fields, especially on embodi-
ment, personhood, intersubjectivity, emotions, and gender. She is coauthor of Birth, Death, and
Femininity (2010) and author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003). She has
coedited several volumes, including Phenomenology and the Transcendental (2014), New Perspectives
to Aristotelianism and Its Critics (2014), and Consciousness (2007). xi Contributors
Wulf D. Hund is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg. He has worked
in social philosophy, social history, and social conflicts. His main area of research is the theory and
history of racism. His books in the latter field include Negative Vergesellschaftung (2006, 2nd ed.
2014), Rassismus (2007), Wie die Deutschen weiß wurden (2017), Rassismus und Antirassismus (2018),
and edited volumes on Wages of Whiteness & Racist Symbolic Capital (2010, with Jeremy Krikler
and David Roediger), Racism and Sociology (2014, with Alana Lentin), Simianization. Apes, Gender,
Class, and Race (2015, with Charles W. Mills and Silvia Sebastiani).
James Jardine is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
at the University of Jyväskylä. His research focuses on issues of emotion, selfhood, and intersub-
jectivity, and he adopts a phenomenological perspective that also seeks to address themes and
questions from critical theory, social philosophy, and philosophy of mind. He has published on
these topics in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Metodo, and Human Studies, as well as in two other
volumes of the Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy series. He is author of Empathy, Embodiment, and
the Person (Springer, 2020) and coeditor of Perception and the Inhuman Gaze (Routledge, 2020).
Jolanda Jetten is Professor of Social Psychology and an ARC Laureate Fellow at the University
of Queensland, Australia (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 1997). She has published widely in
top-tier journals on social identity, group processes, and intergroup relations in small interacting
groups and larger social structures. Her most recent books include Together Apart: The Psychology
of COVID-19 (with Reicher, Haslam and Cruwys, Sage, 2020), The Social Psychology of Inequality
(with Peters, Springer, 2019), The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure (with Haslam,
Cruwys, Dingle, and Haslam, Psychology Press, 2018), and The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity
and the Hardening of Attitudes Towards Minorities (with Mols; Cambridge University Press, 2017).
László Kontler is Professor of History at Central European University (New York - Vienna -
Budapest). His research and publications focus on intellectual history, the history of political thought,
translation and reception, and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in early modern
Europe, mainly the Enlightenment. His recent books include Translations, Histories, Enlightenments:
William Robertson in Germany, 1760–1795 (Palgrave, 2014) and (with Per Pippin Aspaas) Maximilian
Hell (1720–1792) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe (Brill, 2020).
Maria Kronfeldner is Professor of Philosophy at Central European University (New York -
Vienna - Budapest). She works in the history and philosophy of the life sciences and social
sciences, with a focus on causation, explanation, essentialism, diversity and unity, and science and
values. She is editor of this Handbook, author of two books (What’s Left of Human Nature: A Post-
essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept, 2018 with MIT Press; Darwinian
Creativity and Memetics, 2011 with Routledge) and has published several peer-reviewed articles
(one winning the Karl Popper Essay Prize, another the Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize). She
currently directs the Project The Epistemology of the In/Human.
Johannes Lang is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. He has
criticized the concept of dehumanization in a series of articles, beginning with Questioning
Dehumanization (2010) and most recently in The Limited Importance of Dehumanization in Collective
Violence (2020). His latest book is a coedited volume on Emotions and Mass Atrocity (2018).
Edouard Machery is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of
Science at the University of Pittsburgh and the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science xii Contributors
at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Doing Without Concepts (OUP, 2009) and of
Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds (OUP, 2017), as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of
Compositionality (OUP, 2012), La Philosophie Expérimentale (Vuibert, 2012), Arguing about Human
Nature (Routledge, 2013), and Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy (Routledge, 2014).
Pierre Maurage is a Senior Research Associate at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research
(F.R.S.—FNRS) and codirector of the Louvain Experimental Psychopathology research group
at the Psychological Science Research Institute of the UCLouvain (Belgium). His research is
mostly focused on the exploration, using combined experimental psychopathology and neuro-
science approaches, of the psychological and cerebral processes (cognition, emotion, and social
interactions) involved in the development and maintenance of alcohol-related disorders. All
information about his current research projects and all his publications are available on his lab’s website: http://www.uclep.be
Stelian Medianu is a faculty member in the Psychology Department at Douglas College, New
Westminster, British Columbia. He received his PhD in psychology with a specialization in
migration and ethnic relations from Western University, London, Ontario. As a trained social
psychologist, Stelian has used his research skills to better understand the factors that shape
people’s attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. As a research and policy consultant, he has
conducted policy studies, evaluation studies, and organizational reviews on behalf of federal and
provincial governments as well as not-for-profit organizations.
Mari Mikkola is the Chair in Metaphysics at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
She is the author of two books (The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist
Philosophy and Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction, both with OUP) and of several articles on
feminist philosophy, social ontology, and pornography. Her current work is focused on philosoph-
ical methodology, with a monograph on this topic under contract with Oxford University Press.
Erika Lorraine Milam is Professor of History at Princeton University. She is author of
Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (2019) and Looking for a Few
Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (2010). She has coedited with Suman Seth,
Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex, and Human Nature (Themes, Vol. 6, 2021) and with Robert A. Nye,
Scientific Masculinities (Osiris, Vol. 30, 2015). She currently serves as Chair of the Editorial Board
for Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences. Milam’s most recent project delves into the history of
long-term field research in behavioral ecology.
Maria Paola Paladino is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Trento. Her
research focuses on how people perceive, relate, and behave toward other people, or social rele-
vant entities, as robots, with a special interest in the key role of humanness and dehumanization
in these processes. She was one of the original proponents of the infra-humanization theory, and
her approach and hypothesis influenced the current theorizing in the psychology of dehuman-
ization and object anthropomorphism. She is the (co-)author of a number of articles published
in various scientific journals, such as Psychological Science, Social Cognition, and British Journal of Social Psychology.
Silvia Sebastiani is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in
Paris. She is the author of The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (2013),
and has co-edited, with Wulf Hund and Charles Mills, Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class, and xiii Contributors
Race (2015). More recently, she has edited the special issue on Les vitrines de l’humanité/Showcasing
Humanity for the online journal Passés Futurs (2019). She is completing a book on the bound-
aries of humanity in the Enlightenment, especially focusing on the ways in which great apes
contributed to the shaping of human sciences.
David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. He is
author of nine books, including the award-winning Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave,
and Exterminate Others (St. Martin’s Press, 2011) and On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to
Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work on dehumanization, racism, and related topics
has been featured in the national and international media. He lectures widely on dehumanization
in both academic and nonacademic settings, and spoke on dehumanization and mass violence at the 2012 G20 economic summit.
Johannes Steizinger is Assistant Professor at McMaster University (Canada). He specializes in
post-Kantian European philosophy. His systematic research interests include political philosophy,
aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of race, and philosophy of biology. Recent publications include
“The Significance of Dehumanization: Nazi Ideology and its Psychological Consequences”
(Politics, Religion & Ideology 19:2 (2018), 139–157), “Relativism in the Context of National
Socialism” (In: The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, Routledge 2019, 114–123),
“National Socialism and the Problem of Relativism” (In: The Emergence of Relativism, Routledge, 233–251).
Florence Stinglhamber is a Professor of Organizational Psychology and Human Resource
Management in the Psychology Department at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).
Her main research interests include organizational dehumanization and perceived organiza-
tional/supervisor support. She is the (co-)author of a number of peer-reviewed articles published
in international journals, such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior,
and Journal of Vocational Behavior. She is also the coauthor (with R. Eisenberger) of a book titled
Perceived Organizational Support: Fostering Enthusiastic and Productive Employees (APA Books).
Siep Stuurman is Emeritus Professor of the History of Ideas in Utrecht University, The
Netherlands. He studies the ideas of humanity and equality from a world history perspective
and publishes in the major journals of his field. His most recent book, The Invention of Humanity:
Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Harvard, 2017), received the 2019 Carlson Award,
and his book on François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Harvard, 2004)
the 2005 George Mosse Prize by the American Historical Association. He is currently working
on a global intellectual history of socioeconomic equality and inequality.
Alina Sutter received her Master of Science in Psychology from the University of Zurich,
Switzerland, and her PhD in Psychology from Western University, Canada. She is currently a
Research Associate at Western University. Her research interests include topics such as public
attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, as well as barriers immigrants and refugees face in their process of integration.
Andrea Timár is Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd
University, Budapest, and currently (2019/20) a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies, Central European University. Her research and publications focus on 18th- and
19th-century literature and philosophy, contemporary literature, and critical theory. Her first xiv Contributors
monograph, A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), was
nominated for the First Book Prize of the British Association for Romantic Studies. She is also
the author of a volume of essays, The Human Form: Literature, Politics, Ethics from the Eighteenth
Century to the Present (Eötvös Loránd University Press, 2020).
Jeroen Vaes is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Trento, Italy, and obtained
his PhD in 2001 from the Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. His
research focuses on humanness as a dimension of social judgment in intergroup relations, and in
the realm of sexual and medical objectification. He has published numerous research articles and
chapters on these topics in the most important outlets of social psychology and social neurosci-
ence. He also edited a book: Humanness and Dehumanization (with Bain and Leyens, Psychology Press, 2014).
Somogy Varga is Professor of Philosophy at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Senior Research
Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He previously worked at the
University of Memphis, the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück, and
the Institute of Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of Authenticity
as an Ethical Ideal (Routledge, 2011); Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder (OUP, 2015);
and Scaffolded Minds (MIT Press, 2019).
Robert A. Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, having
taught previously at Queen’s University; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the
University of Alberta; and La Trobe University. His publications span the philosophy of mind,
cognitive science, the philosophy of biology, and disability studies. He is the general editor (with
Frank Keil) of the award-winning MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (1999) and the author
of Boundaries of the Mind (Cambridge, 2004) and Genes and the Agents of Life (2005). His most
recent book is The Eugenic Mind Project (MIT Press, 2018); for his other recent work, see his
website robwilsonphilosophy.com. Rob is also active in philosophy in the schools and in philo-
sophical engagement in public life. xv PREFACE
Take the civilians that are tortured, raped, or killed in the shameful line-up of wars and violent
conflicts that we have stockpiled over historical time, with no end in sight. Take that homeless
people, sick people, refugees, or those deemed ‘racially inferior’ are often treated in a far from
respectful manner, likened to bacteria, vermin, or waste, and treated alike. Take the age-old view
that women are only a ‘second’ sex with all the consequences this view has had for the oppression
and the violence women have had to face. Take abusive work relations as part of which people
are treated as exploitable machines. These are all paradigmatic examples of dehumanization
occurring as part of our contemporary social world.
Dehumanization happens when people are depicted, regarded, or treated as not human or less
human. As a result, the dehumanized might, in fact, end up—in ‘the devil’s fairground’—with
less than a human life. What ‘being human’ means as part of dehumanization varies, is often
idealized, and is rarely about an easy-to-capture matter.
Admittedly, the just-given characterization of dehumanization is almost trivially true. It simply
points to the term ‘human,’ without specifying it further, and the prefix ‘de,’ which is used in
words borrowed from Latin to indicate separation, privation, or negation. I start with such a thin
notion since not much agreement exists beyond it in the scholarship on dehumanization, not
even with respect to the above examples. Most scholars will count them as dehumanizing, while
others will not. The skeptics will admit that the cases are describable as cases where the individ-
uals are depicted, regarded, or treated with less moral standing and less respect than other human
beings. Yet, they will argue, these disparaged individuals are depicted, regarded, and treated in that
way qua human beings. Most scholars will count the hatred that is part of genocides, rape, torture,
and similar atrocities as dehumanizing, but some will not. Hatred, the latter will argue, involves
per definition recognition of sorts. Despite these disagreements, the mentioned cases form a
cluster of cases that most scholars will accept as dehumanizing in some sense. That also holds for
the much studied, most often quoted, and in that sense paradigmatic if not enigmatic example of
dehumanizing atrocities of the 20th century: the Holocaust.
Since dehumanization often leads to inhuman treatment of people, it also holds that
understanding dehumanization, the goal of this Handbook, can contribute to describing,
explaining, and eventually preventing or at least exiting the resulting inhumanity, whether that
consists in killing, enslaving, raping, torturing, hunting, or other forms of humiliation, oppression,
subordination, coercion, exploitation, marginalization, inequality, injustice, discrimination, etc. xvi Preface
The related atrocities go by different names: murder, torture, rape, slavery, crimes against humanity,
religious violence, genocides, politicides, ethnocides, democides, ecocides, etc.
If dehumanization happens at the level of depiction or attitudes, it often leads to inhuman
treatment. If dehumanization is actualized, then it consists in inhuman treatment of people, which
amounts to a less than human life of people, or to the end of that life. Yet, neither implies
that all inhuman treatments are due to dehumanization. There are clearly instances of inhuman
treatment for which there are alternative and better descriptions and explanations rather than
pointing to dehumanization. And even in cases in which dehumanization is descriptively and
explanatorily adequate, it will be far from the complete story. In short, dehumanization is not
in everything and never the whole story when ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ is at issue; but it is an
existing phenomenon and a key aspect of inhumanity.
Historically viewed, dehumanization is the dark side of humanism. Since the latter mainly
belongs to the history of the intellectual traditions that descend from Greek Antiquity (conven-
tionally called the ‘West’), dehumanization does so too, even though it exists in other traditions
as well. This Handbook focuses on dehumanization as part of the history of the West, without
denying that it can be found in other traditions.
Humanism frames and opposes dehumanization by two oscillating aspects of it: First, there is
the idea of a universal humanity—that all human beings belong to the same kind and are equal in
that respect. Second, there is the idea of a shared reciprocal humanness—that there are properties
(capacities of humans), such as rationality, morality, civility, etc. that characterize how humans
are, and how they treat and should treat each other reciprocally in specifically human ways. The
different kinds of optimisms that were sometimes connected to humanism (mainly inscribed
in ideas about different kinds of progress: educational, intellectual, moral, legal, social, etc.) have
by now faded away considerably in many quarters of intellectual life. There is also an increasing
awareness that humanness has often been defined in quite biased ways, and that this needs to
change. Nonetheless, that there is a shared humanity and a shared reciprocal humanness (in some
form) is still among the most fundamental ontological assumptions about human beings, at least
as the ontology of the human developed in the West. It has found over time its scientific and
philosophical echo in theories of human nature, moral standing, equality, and justice. It has found
public codification, most importantly in the various legal initiatives and declarations concerning
human rights, crimes against humanity, etc. Since dehumanization is the direct mirror of the
notion that there is a shared humanity and a reciprocal humanness, it is a more elementary notion
compared to humiliation or loss of dignity, which are related but richer notions.
The question that drives this Handbook, which is the first of its kind, is this: How can one
make sense of dehumanization across disciplinary boundaries of the humanities and the social sciences? Maria Kronfeldner xvii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks go to the contributors to this Handbook. Collaborating can be such a
pleasure, especially if it works out—as it did in this Handbook—to cross the inevitable discip-
linary boundaries. I also owe a debt of gratitude to those academic ‘dark factory’ workers who so
kindly agreed to the ‘heavy duty’ of reviewing individual chapters or parts of the Introduction.
Typically, two expert referees reviewed a chapter in a double-masked manner; quite some people
were thus directly involved, in the background, in addition to the contributors. Organizing the
quality control in that manner for such a cross-disciplinary endeavor felt like the notorious ‘you
know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, … who can finally do it.’ I thus
also want to thank those academic ‘scouts,’ who knew somebody, who knew, and shared that
knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is what we all care for; without it, academic life would be in
peril. Given the nature of the procedure, all the referees and scouts have to remain nameless; yet,
they will know what the contributors and I owe them.
Others, who also were involved in the background, can be named. Nick Haslam and
Susan Opotow deserve special mention. Whenever I was lost in the muddy waters of dehu-
manization studies, I dropped them a line and always got help. The research for and the
editing of this Handbook were greatly assisted over the years by my student and postdoc-
toral assistants: Perica Jovchevski, Justin Leuba, and Michele Luchetti. They were my flying
wizards for references, pictures, edits, and the like. A thousand thanks! Many thanks also go
to Louise Antony, Ron Amundson, Hanoch Ben-Yami, Mara-Daria Cojocaru, Lukas Einsele,
Friederike Eyssel, Lukas Franke, László Kontler, László Kőszeghy, András Kovacz, Prem Kumar
Rajaram, Zoltan Miklosi, Andres Moles, Csaba Pléh, Alexander Reutlinger, Simon Rippon,
Rohan Deb Roy, Andrea Timár, Rob Wilson, Gregor Wolbring, Hyaesin Yoon, and my other
colleagues from CEU’s philosophy department. They all discussed with me specific issues and
helped me in many ways that inspired and furthered my thoughts on dehumanization and the plans for this Handbook.
The Handbook is part of my current research project on the Epistemology of the In/Human,
which has received funding from CEU’s Humanities Initiative, the Academic Event Fund, and
the Research Excellence Fund. The idea for the Handbook emerged from the 2016 International
and Interdisciplinary Conference on Dehumanization: New Approaches to Understanding the Politics
of Human Nature (Apr 6–8, 2016). Thanks to the speakers and guests of the conference, I felt con-
fident embarking on the journey toward this Handbook. xviii Acknowledgments
CEU’s librarians showed incredible stamina in providing me with needed material, especially
during the tough time of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. Zsófia Jeney-Domingues acted as pro-
ject manager, skillfully juggling all activities related to the Handbook and the conference, and
weaving in beyond duty her art and design expertise. Krisztina Biber, our departmental coordin-
ator, is the sturdy backbone of my daily academic life, with all the myriad nuisances resolved or
mitigated by her. Many thanks to all of them! xix