Ebook The Radical Philosophy of Rights 1St Edition Costas Douzinas Online PDF All Chapter

The Radical Philosophy of Rights 1st
Edition Costas Douzinas

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-radical-philosophy-of-rights-1st-edition-costas-dou
zinas/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Understanding Process Dynamics and Control 1st Edition

Costas Kravaris
https://ebookmeta.com/product/understanding-process-dynamics-and-
control-1st-edition-costas-kravaris/
Dignity and Human Rights Language Philosophy and Social

Realizations 1st Edition Stephan P. Leher
https://ebookmeta.com/product/dignity-and-human-rights-language-
philosophy-and-social-realizations-1st-edition-stephan-p-leher/
The Philosophy of Philosophy 2nd Edition Timothy

Williamson
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-philosophy-of-philosophy-2nd-
edition-timothy-williamson/
The Effectiveness of the UN Human Rights System Reform

and the Judicialisation of Human Rights 1st Edition
Surya P. Subedi
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-effectiveness-of-the-un-human-
rights-system-reform-and-the-judicialisation-of-human-rights-1st-
edition-surya-p-subedi/
Berkeley s Theory of Radical Dependence 1st Edition
Gavan Jennings
https://ebookmeta.com/product/berkeley-s-theory-of-radical-
dependence-1st-edition-gavan-jennings/
Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism 1st Edition

Edith Hall
https://ebookmeta.com/product/tony-harrison-poet-of-radical-
classicism-1st-edition-edith-hall/
Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John

Heartfield Sabine T. Kriebel
https://ebookmeta.com/product/revolutionary-beauty-the-radical-
photomontages-of-john-heartfield-sabine-t-kriebel/
Managing Change Creativity and Innovation 4th Edition

Patrick Dawson Costas Andriopoulos
https://ebookmeta.com/product/managing-change-creativity-and-
innovation-4th-edition-patrick-dawson-costas-andriopoulos/
Managing Change Creativity and Innovation 3rd Edition

Patrick Dawson Costas Andriopoulos
https://ebookmeta.com/product/managing-change-creativity-and-
innovation-3rd-edition-patrick-dawson-costas-andriopoulos/
The Radical Philosophy
of Rights
After 1989 human rights have expanded into a vernacular touching every aspect of
social life. They are seen as the key concept in morals and politics and a main tool
for forging individual and collective identities. They are the ideology after ‘the
end of ideologies’ – the only values left after ‘the end of history’. The response
of the left to the rights revolution has been muted and unsure. Classical Marxist
critiques of (natural) rights have made the left justly suspicious, and this is still
the case today. Elaborating and addressing a series of foundational paradoxes of
rights, this book – the third in Costas Douzinas’s human rights trilogy, following
The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire – provides a long-
overdue re-evaluation of the history and political uses of rights for the left.
The book examines the history and philosophy of the (legal) person, the
subject, the human and dignity from classical Rome to postmodern Brussels.
It traces the gradual abandonment of right, virtue and the common good for
individual rights and self-interest. The limited and distorted conception of rights
of liberal jurisprudence is contrasted with an alternative that sees rights as a relation
involved in the struggle for recognition and an everyday utopia. The right to
resistance and revolution, prohibited but regularly returning like the repressed,
rescues law from sclerosis and presents a case study of the paradoxical nature of
rights. Finally, the book offers a brief examination of law’s encounter with radical
politics informed by the author’s strange experience as an ‘accidental’ politician
in the first radical left government in Europe. The book’s radical concept of legal
philosophy and public law will be of considerable value to legal theorists, political
philosophers and anyone with an interest in thinking and acting in ways that go
beyond the limits of liberal, and neoliberal, ideology.
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law and Founder of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities, Birkbeck University of London. Costas was elected a
Member of Parliament for Syriza, the radical left Greek party in 2015. His many
previous books include Justice Miscarried, Critical Jurisprudence and Philosophy
and Resistance in the Crisis.
The Radical Philosophy
of Rights
Costas Douzinas
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
a GlassHouse book
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Costas Douzinas
The right of Costas Douzinas to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Douzinas, Costas, 1951– author.
Title: The radical philosophy of rights / Costas Douzinas.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057075 (print) | LCCN 2018057791 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315775388 (ebk) | ISBN 9781138025097 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781138025103 (pbk)
Subjects: LCSH: Human rights—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC K3240 (ebook) | LCC K3240 .D68 2019 (print) |
DDC 323.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057075
ISBN: 978–1–138–02509–7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–1–138–02510–3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–1–315–77538–8 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Introduction: life between university and parliamentvii
PART I
Law, persons, rights1
Prologue: are women and animals persons? 3

1 A brief history of the person 11
2 The story of dignitas22
3 What is the legal person? 32
4 Subject, individual, human 50
5 Legality after virtue: from (objective) right
to (subjective) rights 68
PART II
The paradoxes of rights87
6 The paradoxes of human rights 89

7 Rights, identity, desire 106
8 Marx, the radical left and rights 116
9 The poverty of (rights) jurisprudence 132
PART III
The right to resistance151
10 Philosophy and resistance 153

vi Contents
11 The ‘right to the event’: the legality and morality of

revolution and resistance 168
12 Prolegomena towards a theory of righting 186
Epilogue: critical legal studies goes Greek 195
Bibliography218
Index228
Introduction
Life between university and
parliament
I started writing this book in 2014 and finished it in 2018. It was a long time
coming, much longer by my previous book writing periods. The reason was not
one of the usual rationalizations authors offer to publishers: illness, writer’s block,
deeply felt boredom with the subject. Perhaps these were also present. But the
main reason was that in September 2015 my life changed radically. I was elected
Member of Parliament for my home city of Pireas for the radical left party, Syriza.
I had not planned a transfer from the tranquil (until recently) academic world to
politics. I had not considered moving from London to Athens after forty years
of continuous living in and loving London. The idea had not even crossed my
mind as I was putting together the plan for this book. My life until 2015 explains
why. I came to London in 1974 for graduate studies soon after the end of the
Colonel’s dictatorship, 1967–74. By the time I was appointed to my first lec-
tureship in 1982, I had stopped participating in Greek politics and concentrated
on my scholarship and building the Critical Legal Studies movement. In 1992,
I was appointed with Peter Goodrich to set up the Birkbeck Law School. The
joys and pressures of establishing a Law School in London further distanced me
from Greece. I used to visit in the summer and spend three weeks in the village
of Dryos on the island of Paros. I signed off a few books in Dryos, as my summer
holiday was always of the working variety. With my partner Joanna and daughter
Phaedra, I swam and read, swam and wrote. The life of body and mind blended
harmoniously.
And then came the Greek crisis. I have discussed in Syriza in Power: Reflections
of an Accidental Politician1 the road to the abyss, the resistance of the Greek
people and the rise of Syriza. I started writing in the Guardian, opendemocracy
and other newspapers and websites supporting the Greek resistance, which was
growing by the day. Eventually old comrades and friends I had not heard from
in thirty years contacted me and I connected with political Greece again. I was
one of the few academics based overseas who was describing Greece from the left.
And this is how eventually, at the Critical Legal Conference (CLC) in Cracow,
Poland in early September 2015, I was asked to stand in the elections, only three
1 Polity, 2017.
viii Life between university and parliament
weeks away. I wanted to help the party but was unsure about the idea. Syriza was
the first left party to gain power in Western Europe in January 2015. It hails from
the Eurocommunist tradition of the democratic road to socialism and the student
resistance against the Greek dictatorship during which I had been radicalized.
I asked friends at the conference for advice, spoke to family and friends in Athens.
It was the first time at a CLC that an organic member of the conference and the
holder of its bank account and cheque-book was thinking about moving to the
other side of critique, the power side. Finally, I reluctantly accepted the invitation
after I was informed that the chances of getting elected were 20%.
The experience of politics proved more and less interesting than I expected. Being
under constant attack by the right-wing media – pretty much all the media with a
few exceptions – I remembered how in the early days of the Critical Legal Studies
movement we were treated as something between radical evil and irrelevance. The
head of department in my first job had warned that with my interest in theory and
left politics I should not expect to get on in the legal academy. I had accepted and
internalized the advice. As a result, when I was promoted to a full professorship in
the late 1990s I went into a depression. What was wrong with me – had I betrayed
my two loves to be considered worthy of the ultimate prize? Perhaps.
In Athens and Parliament, I had a honeymoon period at the beginning. I was
elected President of the prestigious Standing Committee on Defense and For-
eign Affairs. I was asked to draft the House resolution demanding the recogni-
tion of the State of Palestine and was involved in other important tasks, such as
the wholesale amendment of the Constitution and the agreement with North
Macedonia. Soon, however, things changed. Influential colleagues considered
my regular newspaper columns, media interviews and the respect I was receiv-
ing from people in the street somewhat problematic. The urge to continue my
academic career, to write academic books and to give a theoretical spin to media
interventions and politics was unusual, perhaps inappropriate. I was called ‘the
Professor’ and ‘the Philosopher’, not suitable monikers for a front-line politi-
cian. I accepted the criticism and internalized it again. I concentrated on the
international side of the work, which included incessant traveling to various capi-
tals to represent Greece and promote the left agenda. And I concentrated on
writing this book and another one in Greek – Syriza in Power was also written
and published in 2017 – about the experience of an accidental life in politics. In
the chamber, in committee rooms, on trains and planes, I kept writing away. It
was a consolation, the work of an obsessive academic and reluctant politician.
I am writing this introduction to the book in the chamber during a debate about
amendments to the constitution. This perhaps explains some repetitions in the
book. But the only reference to Greece in this book is found in the last chapter,
an afterthought on how a critical legal scholar views the law of the crisis years and
how the Greek experience enlightens the relationship between law and politics.
This book concludes my trilogy on human rights: The End of Human Rights,
Human Rights and Empire and The Radical Philosophy of Rights. It revisits and
takes forward past arguments and theses and the long, intense and creative
Life between university and parliament ix
debates they have given rise to. Books on human rights have paid little attention
to the subject of rights and the relationship between right, legal and human
rights. Redressing this omission, the Radical Philosophy examines the history and
practice of the legal person linking it with associated concepts and practices: the
subject in philosophy, the individual in sociology and economics, the human and
her dignity in theology and morality.
The law and its various masks – personas or prosopeia – have conditioned the
story of humanity. Turning to the practice of rights, the book examines the steps
through which the classical search for what is right according to ratio, God or
natural law mutated into a bunch of natural, legal and human rights for indi-
viduals. Liberal jurisprudence and moral philosophy justify and supplement the
work of law. They have turned rights into the site and stake of politics and into
the main resource of ethics. Individualist legal theory is descriptively inaccurate
however because the practice of law cannot exclude the inter-subjective, progres-
sive and collective dimensions of rights, which give them their paradoxical nature.
By neglecting this aspect of rights and missing or deleting their radical potential,
liberal jurisprudence suffers from a certain moral and epistemic poverty.
The second part of the book presents the paradoxes of rights theory and
practice. Rights have been used both to promote the interests of corporations and
neoliberal policies and the struggle for liberation of the excluded, the exploited
and the oppressed. The reference to ‘humanity’ in human rights introduces an
element of normative universality into the law. But the history of humanity since
the adoption of the Universal Declaration indicates that there is no common or
accepted conception of what it means to be human. Some people are fully human,
others less so, and a large part of humanity has been excluded from the protections
of law. The fate of refugees and migrants trying to enter Europe or North America
shows this gradation of humanity. The third part of the book examines the right
to resistance and revolution. Philosophy and law ban the right to revolution and
try to prevent its occurrence. But resistance always returns, like the repressed, and
protects the law from sclerosis. The Radical Philosophy presents the philosophical,
moral and legal evidence supporting the argument that resistance and revolution
have a normative foundation. The right to disobedience, resistance and even
revolution recognizes their contribution to the integrity of law.
Joanna Bourke has been a companion, inspiration and judge. She followed
recent peregrinations and has supported me fully in the difficult transition from
London to Athens and from the lecture hall to the Parliamentary chamber. She has
continued her world-class research and scholarship while commuting between our
two homes. I owe her my successes and I am responsible for any failures. Phaedra
Douzina-Bakalaki has developed in the period of writing this book into a mature
scholar and academic and the most sharp and incisive critic of my theoretical
and political moves. In Athens, Alexandra Bakalaki, Athena Athanassiou, Elena
Tzelepi, Christos Lyrintzis, Akis Papataxiarchis, Efi Avdela, Gianna Kandilorou,
Nikos Douzinas and Annick Paterneau have been intimate friends and friendly
critics. This book would not have happened without their intellectual input
and moral solidarity. My close friends in Parliament have felt bemused by my
x Life between university and parliament
obsessive writing but have fully supported me. In London, Conor Gearty, Emilios
Christodoulidis, Adam Gearey, Illan Wall, Oscar Guardiola, Michelle Everson
and Stewart Motha have provided wisdom, ideas and encouragement. I owe
them a lot although their influence is not always mentioned. Paddy McDaid,
Dimitris Kivotidis, Julia Chryssostali, Patrick Hanafin, Mat Stone, Moniza Anrisi,
Alexis Alvarez, Leticia Paes, Elena Leontidou and Basak Ertur have contributed
knowingly or unknowingly to the ideas of this book. My only unmitigated regret
about entering politics is that I have not seen many of my London friends for
some time. I miss them all and I hope that soon I will be in a position to meet
them more often. The ideas of these friends and comrades are disseminated
throughout this book.
Parts of chapters appeared first in different form in books and journals. Chapter 6
appeared in Constellations, 20/1 (2013); Chapter 8 in Costas Douzinas and
Slavoj Zizek (eds), The Idea of Communism (Verso, 2010); Chapter 9 in Costas
Douzinas and Connor Gearty (eds), The Cambridge Companion of Human
Rights Law eds (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Chapter 10, in Connor
Gearty and Costas Douzinas (eds), The Meaning of Rights (Cambridge University
Press, 2012) and Chapter 12 in Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology
and Philosophy, 2/1 (2014). The manuscript needed extra attention as it was
written interstitially in the most unwelcoming locations. Paddy McDaid, a friend
and great thinker did an excellent job in editing it.
Elections are a few months away at the time of writing these lines. I don’t know
what the unpredictable will of the people and the all too predictable fate have
in store. But I have one great consolation. When I joined Parliament a prudent
Member told me that I had to forget my University interests because they clash
with politics, which is all demanding and devouring. In finishing this book I feel
that I fulfilled in part the promise I gave to my intimates and myself: I would
persist with my academic vocation, I would not become exclusively a professional
politician.
Part I
Law, persons, rights

Prologue
Are women and animals persons?
Are women persons? Are animals persons? Are women animals? Such questions
have repeatedly occupied the law. Legal personality has not been exclusively
bestowed on humans. As Yan Thomas has shown, the natural human being was
given legal personality relatively late and only after the creation of corporate
personality which acted as a model for the development.1 The discrepancy has
survived. Slaves have been excluded from humanity throughout history. Pigs,
rats, leeches and insects were accused of crimes in the Middle Ages, formally
summoned to courts of law, tried, convicted and punished.2 Animals arraigned
before courts included ‘asses, beetles, bloodsuckers, bulls, caterpillars, chickens,
cock chafers, cows, dogs, dolphins, eels, field mice, flies, goats, grasshoppers,
horses, locusts, mice, moles, pigeons, pigs, rats, serpents, sheep, slugs, snails,
termites, weevils, wolves, worms, and miscellaneous vermin’.3 The punishments
varied from execution by burning at the stake, and alive, to strangling and impris-
onment for lighter offences. In 1522, rats were acquitted in Autun of the felony
of eating and wantonly destroying the barley crops. An idol and a God have been
given rights and duties;4 Christopher Stone ignited a major debate arguing that
trees, parks and other natural objects too should be given rights.5 Greenbelt
zones, it is argued, should become legal subjects with the power to go to court,
through representatives, to protect the ecosystem from intrusion.6 Recently a
river, a waterfall and the environment have been recognized in some jurisdictions
1 Yan Thomas, ‘Le sujet de droit, la personne et la nature. Sur la critique contemporaine du
sujet de droit’ (1998) 100(3) Le Débat 85.
2 Jean Vartier, Les procès des animaux du Moyen Age à nos jours (Hachette 1970); Luc Ferry,
The New Ecological Order (trans. Carol Volk, University of Chicago Press 1992) ix–xvi.
3 Gunther Teubner, ‘Rights of Non-humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in
Politics and Law’ (2006) 33(4) Journal of Law and Society 497, 498.
4 P.W. Duff, ‘The Personality of an Idol’ (1927) 3(1) Cambridge Law Journal 42.
5 Christopher Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects’
(1972) 45 Southern California Law Review 450.
6 Marie-Angèle Hermitte, ‘Le concept de diversité biologique et la création d’un status de la
nature’ in L’homme, la nature, le droit (Bourgeois 1988).
4 Law, persons, rights
as persons with limited rights. Artificial intelligence, automated electronic and
vending machines have been given some legal rights.7
The common law discovered that persons have gender as late as 1929. Almost
a hundred years later, in April 2015, the Manhattan Supreme Court granted a
writ of habeas corpus to two chimpanzees being held at Stony Brook University
for medical experimentation.8 Women were given personhood in the early twen-
tieth century, apes are on the way in the early twenty-first. The artificial nature
of legal personhood denied to some humans but given to many non-humans has
been fully confirmed in the post-modern world.
In April 1872, ‘An Earnest Englishwoman’ published a letter in The Times
entitled ‘Are Women Animals?’ Addressing British Parliamentarians, it read:
Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated;
whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to
ask for a definite acknowledgment that at least they are animals? ... Many
hon. members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes
respecting the suffrage, ‘whenever words occur which import the masculine
gender they shall be held to include women’; but could any object to the
insertion of a clause in another Act that ‘whenever the word “animal’ occurs
it shall be held to include women’?; Suffer me, through your columns, to
appeal to our 650 representatives, and ask – IS not one among you then who
will introduce such a motion? There could then be at least an equal interdict
on wanton barbarity to cat, dog, or woman.9
The ‘Earnest Englishwoman’ was complaining about the status and

treatment of women in the late nineteenth century. Women were treated in law
as a ‘chattel’ by their fathers, husbands or guardians. Domestic rape and cruelty
went unpunished, while the maltreatment of animals was commonly penalized.
A similar treatment was meted out to women in the United States. Persons of
colour were still slaves and could be treated as things to be bought and sold
in many American jurisdictions. The infamous British Contagious Diseases Acts
of the 1860s authorized the rounding-up of prostitutes and women judged
to be promiscuous for mandatory venereal diseases testing and subsequent
imprisonment. As Joanna Bourke drily comments, ‘the legislation treated women
as a whole as nothing more than contagious animals, while at the same time they
7 David J. Calverley, ‘Legal Rights for Machines Some Fundamental Concepts’ in Michael
Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson (eds), Machine Ethics (Cambridge University Press
2011).
8 Although within a day the judge struck the writ of habeas corpus from the order. See Alan
Yuhas, ‘Chimpanzees granted petition to hear “legal persons’ status in court’ Guardian
(London 22 April 2015) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/21/chimpan
zees-granted-legal-persons-status-unlawful-imprisonment> accessed 14 August 2018.
9 Joanna Bourke, What it Means to Be Human (Virago 2012) 1.
Are women and animals persons? 5
identified the real “mute creatures’ in class terms’.10 The legislation outraged
women of all classes and led to the creation of a strong proto-feminist movement
to which the Earnest Englishwoman probably belonged.
In law, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became known as
the age of the ‘persons’ cases. Whenever the word ‘person’ appeared in a British
statute it was taken to refer exclusively to men. The British Parliament repeatedly
denied the franchise to women who could not be elected to public office. The
suffrage movement had started but was not having much impact yet. The case
of de Souza v. Cobden,11 is instructive. Jane Cobden was elected to the London
County Council under a statute, which ruled that a candidate should be ‘a fit
person of full age’. Electoral legislation allowed challenges to the result within
a year, after which point it was deemed valid. Cobden did not take her seat for
a year in order to have her election validated. But once she took it and voted on a
resolution she was prosecuted and convicted under a statute that made it a crime
for ‘any person’ to act in office without being qualified. The Court of Appeal
compared the two statutes and concluded that Cobden was a ‘person’ on some
occasions, not on others. She was not a ‘person’ for the purpose of being elected
to the Council; but she was a ‘person’ for the purposes of criminal law. By taking
her seat and voting illegally she had committed a crime and was convicted.
To the contemporary reader this was a perverse decision, and so it was. To
be sure, the law will never shirk from a contradiction if it can help to keep the
social order. It was not, however, perverse in its approach to legal personality.
As we will argue, personhood is a bundle of obligations and rights given by the
law and differing substantially from human to human. Refusing women political
rights is discriminatory and morally wrong. But a legal person is what the law
says, and law’s business has always been to differentiate and discriminate. The
legal person and the human being behind it are two separate and distinct enti-
ties. Since women could not be equated to men, the Earnest Englishwoman was
asking to be treated as an animal. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals was founded in 1824 at a point where women were still considered the
chattel of their fathers or husbands who could brutally punish them with minimal
retribution.12 Utilitarian principles of pleasure and suffering on the other hand
had already created strong protections for animals, which should be ‘extended
to all who need them in this country’.
But does a person have sex and gender? The common law discovered sex
in 1929 in the case of Edwards v Canada (AG).13 Before Edwards, the word
‘person’ referred, in all important instances, exclusively to men. The case started
when Emily Murphy, a feminist, put her name forward to Robert Boden, the
10 Ibid., 98.
11 1 QB 687 (AC 1891).
12 Bourke, op.cit., Chapter 4.
13 Henrietta Muir Edwards and others v The Attorney General of Canada [1929] UKPC 86,
[1930] AC 124 (18 October 1929), PC (on appeal from Canada).
Canadian Prime Minister, as a candidate for the Senate. Under the British North
America Act 1867, s.24, the government could ‘summon qualified Persons to the
Senate’. The PM refused to summon Ms Murphy because as a woman she was
not a ‘person’. After a 500,000-strong petition backed Murphy, Boden stated
that he could not appoint her because, according to a 1876 British common law
ruling, ‘women are eligible for pains and penalties, but not rights and privileges’.
At that point, the ‘Famous 5’ feminists – Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie
McClung, Louise McKinney, Emily Murphy and Irene Parlby, asked the Supreme
Court of Canada to rule on the matter.
The legal question was put succinctly: ‘Does the word “Persons” in section 24
of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?’14 The difference
between the gendered human being and the abstract (legal) person could not
be stated more strikingly. Before the mid-1800s, legal language distinguished
between male and female persons and stated clearly the instances when the law
applied to one sex only. However, at some point between 1822 and 1878, the law
stopped referring to the two sexes expressly. The reference of the term ‘person’
exclusively to males was no longer spelt out. Under a general presumption in
interpretation, the law applied to both sexes without the need for a specific
mention. This was the reason that Canadian women formulated their question
in gendered terms. The Canadian Supreme Court unanimously concluded that
women were not persons. Women could not enter the British Parliament in
1876, the year the Constitution Act was passed in Westminster. Therefore, for
the drafters of the 1867 Act, persons must have male sex for the purpose of
holding political office.
The ‘Famous 5’ persisted and appealed to the Privy Council in London. On
18 October 1929, the Council overturned the decision of the Supreme Court
by deciding that the word ‘person’ did indeed include persons of the female gen-
der. The term ‘qualified persons’ could be read broadly to include women. For
the Council, the reversal was plain logic.
To those who ask why the word [‘person’] should include females, the
obvious answer is why should it not … [T]heir Lordships have come to
the conclusion that the word ‘persons’ in sec. 24 includes members both
of the male and female sex and that, therefore, ... women are eligible to be
summoned to and become members of the Senate of Canada.
In or about 1929, women were admitted to the status of personhood. What

about animals? The great apes are biologically close to humans; chimpanzees
share with us 98% of their DNA. The animal rights movement has had a number
of successes recently. The Spanish Parliament gave limited rights to great apes
in 2003. It is illegal to kill, torture, arbitrarily imprison or use apes for medical
experimentation. Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, the directors of the Great Ape
14 Reference re meaning of the word ‘Persons’’ in s. 24 of British North America Act, [1928] SCR
276, 1928 CanLII 55 (SCC).
Project and main advocates of the law, have argued that apes are a ‘community of
equals’ with humans.15 They feel fear and happiness, they use language and tools
and remember the past. Spain’s Catholic bishops, on the other hand, attacked the
law because it defies God, who placed humans above animals. One did not stop
at the biblical story: equating animals with humans would lead to the legalization
of ‘abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing’.16
Singer’s utilitarian strategy aims to create sympathy and care by drawing on the
similarities between humans and apes. A second legal strategy utilizes the differ-
ence between legal personhood and the entity behind it. Steven Wise, an animal
rights campaigner and the Director of the Nonhuman Rights Project, has been
trying to turn apes into ‘nonhuman persons’ and extend this way basic legal pro-
tections. They have been trying to get a court to issue a writ of habeas corpus and
examine the lawfulness of an animal’s incarceration in a lab or zoo. Their strategy
is not to seek to equate apes with humans, but to obtain direct albeit partial
legal personhood. Their hope is that if they succeed, apes will be entitled to legal
protection and possible release from captivity. In 2014, Wise applied for habeas
corpus in New York on behalf of Tommy, a privately owned chimpanzee.17 As
‘autonomous and self-determining’ beings, Wise argued, chimpanzees possess
legal rights, which preclude Tommy’s captivity. Tommy should be compared to a
human child who ‘can understand that he does not want to be imprisoned for his
life in a cage’, but, unlike a human adult, cannot be held legally responsible for
his actions.18 The judge noted that legal personhood comes with ‘responsibilities’
and it would be unwise ‘to foist any responsibilities on this chimpanzee’.
The appeal failed when the New York Court of Appeals ruled unanimously
that the owner of Tommy is not obliged to release him. Apes are intelligent but
unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to
societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions … In
our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal
duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal
rights – such as the fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of
habeas corpus – that have been afforded to human beings.19
15 Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (St Mar-
tin’s Griffin 1994).
16 Donald G. McNeil Jr, ‘When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans’ New York Times (New
York 13 July 2008) <https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13mcneil.
html> accessed 14 August 2018.
17 Elizabeth Barber, ‘Chimpanzees Are Not Entitled to Human Rights, New York Court
Says’ Time (5 December 2014) <http://time.com/3619581/chimpanzee-tommy-human-
animal-rights> accessed 14 August 2018.
18 ‘Tommy – Appellate Court Hearing’ (The Nonhuman Rights Project, 8 October 2014)
<http://www.nonhumanrights.org/content/uploads/2014/11/Tommy-Appellate-
Court-Transcript-100814.pdf> accessed 14 August 2018.
19 People ex rel. Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Lavery, 124 AD3d 148 [3d Dept 2014]
<http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/ad3/Decisions/2014/518336.pdf> accessed on 14
August 2018.
The courts opted for a definition of moral personality rather than legal
personhood. The references to rights, responsibilities and accountability build
a Kantian conception inappropriate for non-humans. This will be explored in
more depth in Chapters 2 and 5. However legal personhood, a constructed
and artificial status, does not need to pass such stringent moral tests. It is not
exclusively a question of rights but of provision of protections and security. Legal
personhood without the ascription of specific rights can protect an entity from
activities or practices that negate or belittle its nature.
The first victory for animal personhood came in a Buenos Aires in late 2014.
The court accepted that Sandra, an orangutan, should be released from the zoo.
She deserved the basic rights of a ‘nonhuman person’ and she had been unlawfully
deprived of her freedom.20 At first glance, recognizing Sandra not as an object
but a ‘nonhuman person’ with basic rights such as life, liberty and freedom from
torture, looks like a striking development. But the legal technique is common
and well-understood. The law regulates social relations by endowing entities
with a bundle of obligations and rights. The court’s argument in the Tommy
case ‘that human beings possess the unique ability to bear legal responsibility’
was wrong.21 Legal responsibility can be borne by companies, gods, churches or
nature reserves and apes as much as by humans. The law constructs the bearer
of rights; the dividing line has been consistently elastic, sometimes extending at
others contracting the status of legal personhood.
The American law finally started extending the line in 2015. A Manhattan
Supreme Court Justice granted two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, the right
to seek a writ of habeas against unlawful imprisonment.22 The apes were used
for medical experiments at Stony Brook University. Stony Brook was asked to
explain why the chimpanzees should continue to be ‘unlawfully detained’ instead
of being transferred to a primate sanctuary in Florida. The Nonhuman Rights Pro-
ject (NhRP) welcomed the decision, arguing that it moves a long way towards rec-
ognizing apes as legal persons. ‘Only a “legal person” may have an order to show
cause and have a writ of habeas corpus issued in his or her behalf. The court has
therefore implicitly determined that Hercules and Leo are “persons” ’.
In July 2015, New York County Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe, refused
the relief ‘for now’, citing the Tommy precedent. However she added:
‘Legal personhood’ is not necessarily synonymous with being human …

Rather, the parameters of legal personhood have been and will continue to
20 Richard Lough, ‘Captive orangutan has human right to freedom, argentine court rules’
Reuters (21 December 2014) <http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/21/us-argen
tina-orangutan-idUSKBN0JZ0Q620141221> accessed 14 August 2018.
21 Patrick Barkham, ‘Sandra the “Nonhuman Person” is Sadly Not the Face of a Welfare
Revolution’ Guardian (London 22 December 2014) < https://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2014/dec/22/sandra-nonhuman-orangutan-welfare-revolution-court-
ruling> accessed 14 August 2018.
22 Yuhas, op.cit.
be discussed and debated by legal theorists, commentators, and courts and
will not be focused on semantics or biology, even philosophy, but on the
proper allocation of rights under the law, asking, in effect, who counts under
our law.23
Steven Wise of the NhRP commented:
This is one step in a long, long struggle … The judge does not say explicitly
that our non-human plaintiffs were persons but by issuing the order … she’s
either saying implicitly that they are or that they certainly can be. So that’s
the first time that has happened.
Wise argues that chimpanzees are intelligent, emotionally complex and self-
aware enough to merit some basic human rights, such as the rights against illegal
detainment and cruel treatment. They are ‘autonomous and self-determining’,
comparing intelligent mammals to similarly intelligent young children who
possess basic rights but are not able to fully exercise them. In the meantime, the
chimpanzees were transferred from Stony Brook to the University of Louisiana,
which owned them, in an attempt to discontinue the jurisdiction of New York
courts. Eventually the University announced, in May 2016, that it would transfer
Hercules, Leo and 218 other chimpanzees that remain in captivity at its research
centre to a chimpanzee sanctuary.
In a similar case taken by Steve Wise on behalf of Tommy and Kiko, two chim-
panzees held in captivity, the New York appeals court rejected the application
for habeas corpus in September 2017. In a circuitous argument, the court said
that the apes are not humans and therefore cannot be granted legal personhood.
‘The asserted cognitive and linguistic capabilities of chimpanzees do not translate
to a chimpanzee’s capacity or ability, like humans, to bear legal duties, or to be
held legally accountable for their actions’, wrote Justice Troy Webber in his sum-
mary of the case. He continued:
Petitioner argues that the ability to acknowledge a legal duty or legal

responsibility should not be determinative of entitlement to habeas relief,
since, for example, infants cannot comprehend that they owe duties or
responsibilities and a comatose person lacks sentience, yet both have legal
rights.24
23 Michael Mountain ‘New York Justice Denies Habeas Corpus Relief for Hercules and Leo
Given Precedent Set in Previous Case, “For Now” ’ (Nonhuman Rights Blog, 30 July 2015)
<http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/2015/07/30/new-york-justice-denies-habeas-
corpus-relief-for-hercules-and-leo-given-precedent-set-in-previous-case-for-now> accessed
14 August 2018.
24 George Drovsky, ‘Appeals Court Says Chimps Are Not Legal Persons – Here’s Why They’re
Wrong’ (Gizmodo 6 September 2017) <https://gizmodo.com/appeals-court-says-chimps-
are-not-legal-persons-heres-w-1795959514> accessed 14 August 2018.
The discussion of the legal personality of women and animals shows two
different strategies at work. The extension of legal recognition to great apes is a
defensive mechanism. Whether the reasoning for such extension is utilitarian or
rights-based, it aims at protecting animals from maltreatment and suffering. By
including animals into a social institution it protects them from the evils society
and humans visit on them. The extension of personhood to women was different.
It extended the definition of personhood to a group of humans excluded from
it. In comparing the two cases we realize how political strategies assigning
personhood operate. Personality is, first, a border practice, a mechanism of
including/excluding entities from recognition, agency and protection. Second,
within the recognized and included group, personhood differentiates between
those who receive full protection and rights and those with limited and defective
privileges. Similar arguments have been put forward for and against the attribution
of personality to other non-human entities, such as Bruno Latour’s ‘actants’, that
is non-humans to which science has given a voice. Computer programs or other
electronic means that initiate or respond interactively without action by humans
fall into that category; or ‘hybrids’, which create associations between humans
and non-humans.25
It is interesting to note that in the ‘war on terror’, American law justified the
use of torture and, in a similar vein, ruled that State authorities are not obliged
to administer lethal injections in ways that avoid great pain for the convict. In
this context, Adam Coher, repeating unwittingly the argument of the Earnest
Englishwoman, argued that ‘if apes are given the right to humane treatment, it
just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins’.26 The
extension of legal personhood to animals could increase the protection for
humans. The borderline that determines personhood may extend and expand
but also shrink and withdraw. The legal person, this ancient legal technique, has
retained its separating and dividing use throughout the ages. The first part of this
book examines its historic vacillation and contemporary usage.
25 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Harvard Univer-
sity Press 2004).
26 Adam Cohen, ‘What’s Next in the Law? The Unalienable Rights of Chimps’ New York Times
(New York 14 July 2008) <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/opinion/14mon4.
html?_r=1&> accessed on 14 August 2018.
1 A brief history of the person
The word Person has so many customary and more or less legitimate mean-
ings, not to mention imposing verbal juggles, that it ought never to be used
in controversy or exposition without some limiting prefix or affix.1
This is the story of a technical legal term, which emerged in Rome and has
expanded, diversified and multiplied over a period of twenty-two centuries to
become metaphysical value, ideological weapon and practical tool. The terms
legal person, legal subject (sujet du droit) and the human are used today inter-
changeably. Yet, it is the claim of this chapter that the person, with its com-
plex genealogy, its advances and retreats, turns and digressions, lies opposite the
human; the person is the foundation of terms such as the individual or the citizen.
The person is separate from the human, it is the human with social, cultural and
political meaning.
Persona is a chameleon term and practice. Its bizarre political and institutional
history helped both individuate and homogenize people. Marcel Mauss has
traced in a classical article the early history and anthropology of the category. For
Mauss, the idea of the person has evolved from humble beginnings into the self-
conscious and omnipotent self of modernity.2 The initial drive for the journey is
found in a crucial distinction all civilizations draw: they separate ordinary humans
from those who perform certain roles or functions in public or private life – priest,
judge, reincarnation of spirits or pater familias, carer or master of slaves. Pub-
licly performed and recognized offices are an anthropological constant. Mauss
argues that all societies move from abstraction and selection to concreteness and
individuality, from generic roles to persons and selves. Person and personage are
key institutions and bridges in the passage from ancient to modern culture. In
archaic societies, the persona, the face of the dead ancestor or the death mask of
the Roman imago, was kept in the family home in order to preserve and honour
the dead in his image.
1 W.M. Thorburn, ‘What is a Person?’ (1917) 26(103) Mind 291, 307.

2 Marcel Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of
Self’ in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person:
Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge University Press 1985) 1–25.
The fascinating story of the persona starts with the Greek prosopon or proso-
peion, the theatrical mask used to disguise the face of an actor. Women did not
appear on the classical Athenian stage. A male actor would wear a female mask
and perform the roles of Antigone, Phaedra or Medea. The Greek prosopon was
translated into Latin as persona. According to a fertile but contested etymology
that works in both languages and was extensively exploited by Hannah Arendt
and Simone Weil, persona comes from per-sonare: it is a device – the mask –
through which the human voice sounds and is magnified.3 The mask identified
the actor with the role and later with the character the actor performed. As Mauss
put it, persona meant the mask worn by actors on stage and by extension an
‘artificial “character” (personage), the mask and role of comedy and tragedy, of
trickery and hypocrisy – a stranger to the self (moi)’.4
Rome, unlike Greece, passed the function of the mask from ritual and stage
to the law. The three legal institutions were personas, res (things) and actiones
(legal actions or remedies). The law repeated the function of the theatrical mask.
It constructed an artifice and assigned it to a human being. Persona and homo
were separate entities, the legal person was the double of the human. The persona
describes the subject of a legal relation as well as his abstract function or status.
As the jurist Hermann Vultejus put it, persona is a homo habens caput civile, a
man with civil status.5 Personhood is invested with functions and roles, privileges
and duties such as citizen and senator, father and son, master and slave. A person
is a set of social relations with people and things. This imaginative transfer from
stage to law created one of the most enduring characteristics of Western culture.
It formed law’s fundamental fact, the original legal fiction one could say, the
ritual and metaphorical disguise a litigant puts over his natural face in order to be
brought before the law. The legal person ‘literally derives from persona – which
initially means an actor’s mask – and authorizes me to translate the formula de
jure personarum by “of the law of masks”. In all institutional systems the political
subject is reproduced through masks’.6
Roman law recognized persons and things not human beings. As the legal
historian Yan Thomas has argued, the union of person and human is not physical,
bodily or psychological. It is the unity of patrimony and heritage.7 A legal person
is someone with a certain status; personality is a garment placed on the body in
order to facilitate transactions with other persons and things. No human being,
3 Hanna Arendt, On Revolution (Viking Press 1965) 106; Simone Weil, ‘On Human Person-
ality’ in Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader (ed. George A. Panichas, Moyer Bell Ltd.
1977).
4 Mauss, op.cit.,17.
5 Quotes in Visa Kurki, ‘Animals, Slaves and Corporations: Analyzing Legal Thinghood’
(2017) 18(5) German Law Journal at 1073.
6 Pierre Legendre, Le Desir politique de Dieu: Etudes sure les montages de l’Etat et du Droit
(Fayard 1988) 225–6.
7 Yan Thomas, ‘Le sujet de droit, la personne et la nature. Sur la critique contemporaine du
sujet de droit’ (1998) 100(3) Le Débat 85–107.
A brief history of the person 13
not even the free citizen, is a legal person by nature. Only some humans have
legal personality. Before achieving legal status, people have no public recogni-
tion. They live in a world of indistinction, mere homines, similar to that of slaves
or things. ‘A human being or homo in the original meaning of the word’, writes
Hannah Arendt, is ‘indicating someone outside the range of the law and the body
politic of the citizens, as for instance a slave – but certainly a politically irrelevant
being’.8 To become a person, the citizen must first acquire an estate or become a
father to sons in the ritual of filius in potestate. Conversely, persons could revert to
the earlier status of non-personality if they lost the persona defining relationship –
estate or paternity. The degradation could also happen through the ritual of
capitis diminutio, which had a number of versions. Its harshest maxima version
deprived the person of all legal recognition and turned him into homo sacer.
Legal personality was assigned therefore on a combination of family status and
property. The persona was the master of an estate and its members – sons, workers
and slaves. Not all humans were legal persons; conversely, a legal person could
consist of more than one human or have no relation to a human being. Finally,
the same human could actually have two or more personalities. A father and
son, for example, are a single person when representing the estate. After mar-
riage, a man may acquire two personalities and can be shared or represent both
the estates of his father and his father-in-law. On the death of the master, an
estate forms a single person for the purposes of succession, an early example of
the metonymical extension of legal personification from humans to things.
Roberto Esposito has argued compellingly that legal devices limit freedom
in form, extent and duration creating a ‘residue [...] of the natural horizon of
slavery’.9 Personality is a term of distinction and a strategy of exclusion that sepa-
rates persons from things, first, and then differentiates the privileged few from the
great plebeian mass creating the hierarchies of dignitates. A line
divides the world of life, cutting it into two areas defined by their mutual
opposition. You either stand of this side of the divide, with the persons, or
on the other side with the thing: there is no segment in between to unite
them.10
The person is ‘the category of those who enjoy a certain right defined by con-
trast with those who, not falling within it, are excluded from it’.11
For Esposito, the key juxtaposition is between person and thing, persona
and res. The slave existed in a space between the two, as a living thing and an
8 Arendt, op.cit., 107.

9 Robert Esposito, The Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal (trans.
Zakiya Hanafi, Polity 2012) 79.
10 Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things (Polity 2015) 2.
11 Roberto Esposito, ‘The Person and Human Life’ in Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (eds),
Theory after ‘Theory’ (Routledge 2011) 209.
objectified human. But that space was flexible and its borders porous. A slave, the
human thing, could become a person through rituals of emancipation, while a
person could fall into slavery. The law used the category of the person in order to
separate between humans and others and develop abstract and general concepts
and strategies of inclusion and exclusion. What was important was the drawing of
lines and the separating action, not the entities separated which could move from
one to the other side of the line. As image and simulacrum of the dead, as theatri-
cal mask that plays perceptual tricks or as legally recognized representation, the
persona is an element of artifice and masquerade. There was nothing ‘natural’ in
the strategy of inclusion/exclusion. But there is more. The mask and the persona
are political technologies, mechanisms for the organization and stratification of
power and property. Personhood first excludes and then differentiates among
the included, distributing roles, positions and privileges. It distributes power and
property and allows those endowed with personality to enter into public and
political life and to carry out specific economic transactions. The mask signifies
that the wearer is invested with a particular sacred or secular status. Similarly, the
legal person is a legal creation, an artificial character and abstract function; as a
formal vessel, it can contain and give form to all sorts of contents. The persona is
a technology of separation and division, the first and still most successful tool for
the legal stratification and regulation of social relations.
Stoic metaphysics infused the prosopon/persona with moral animus setting it
on its journey to metaphysical sacralization. Cicero often used persona instead of
homo in his philosophical works and helped displace the use of personality from
the Jus Civile into the Jus Naturale. The persona was not just a legal technique;
it started partaking the dignity of nature. As a good lawyer and politician, Cicero
exploited the dramatic and forensic meanings of the term, indicating the multiple
roles an artificial person could perform – what we would today call someone’s
many ‘subject positions’: Sustineo unus tres personas, mei, adversarii, et judicis.
Hobbes translates and comments: ‘I bear three persons: my own, my adversary’s,
and the judge’s; and is called in diverse occasions, diversely: as a “representer”
or “representative,” a “lieutenant,” a “vicar,” and “attorney,” a “deputy,” a
“procurator,” an “ ‘actor,” and the like’.12 Cicero’s three persons in one – a clear
anticipation of the divine trinity – operate in a legal setting. The other personas
Hobbes mentions – vicar, lieutenant or deputy – indicate the multiple creative
powers of the institutional mask. Without the persona’s public investment, no
political recognition or status differentiation exists – no bios, only zoe.
The Greek and Roman Stoics lived in a society of dignitates. These were the
highly regimented and individualized powers and privileges a public office carried;
they were different for magistrate, general or senator. The Stoics countered these
plural dignitates, which hierarchized people, with attributes all humans share.
Such was the syneidisis or the ‘common notions’ or the Greek orthos logos and
12 Cicero, De Oratore (Loeb 1989) 118b and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (ed. J.C.A. Gaskin,
Oxford University Press 1998) 107.
the Roman recta ratio. The Greek syneidisis (joint or shared knowledge) was
translated into Latin as conscientia. The conscius, literally someone who knows
with others or shares a secret, was initially the accomplice and later the witness
of an act. Medieval philosophers distinguished between ‘conscientia’ and
‘synderesis’. ‘Synderesis’ became the foundation of conscience and the basis of
moral reasoning, while ‘conscientia’ was restricted to the judgment an individual
makes before acting. As the conscience was transformed from shared knowledge
to moral conscience it endowed the prosopon, its possessor and carrier, with
moral significance. Moral conscience eventually diversified into consciousness
and added ‘a sense of being conscious, independent, autonomous, free and
responsible’.13 Epictetus used the two meanings of the term when he advised
the examination and control of conscience, by quoting Marcus: ‘carve out your
mask, role or character’.14 The road towards the double life of the person as
(self-)consciousness and (moral) conscience had started.
From legal to moral person

The Stoic innovation launched the homo duplex, the person with double life: he
is the bearer of a role and the associated dignitates and privileges as well as the
embodiment of universally shared physical or spiritual characteristics. Full meta-
physical universalism was however reached when Christianity sacralized the per-
son, turning a legal concept into a metaphysical category. It was the early Church
Father Tertullian who transferred first the term persona from law to divinity in
order to describe the three phases or functions of Trinitarian God. This strange
displacement of a legal term into monotheistic deity launched great theological
and political controversies. The attempt to explain and defend the idiosyncratic
idea of one god with three phases led to heresy, schisms and wars. It breathed an
air of spirituality into a legal and secular term preparing its eventual displacement
onto the whole humanity.
For the Fathers of the Church, the persona gradually became man tout court,
initially the male part of the species, later all humans. This move was carried
out in the interstices of the intricate and politically sensitive Christological and
iconoclastic disputes. The Christian imago dei reaches his true nature by imitat-
ing the moral unity of God. Divine unity is complex however. The Christological
debates concluded that incarnate Christ was perfect god and perfect man. This
unsteady alliance of celestial and terrestrial dimensions prepared their eventual
divorce and the radical separation of spirit from flesh. At the same time, the
one God was endowed with three personalities, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The Nicene orthodoxy of ‘unitas in tres personas, una persona in duas naturas’
brought together the three personalities of the Monos Theos with the two equally
perfect natures – divine and human – of incarnate Christ. The divine personalities
13 Mauss, op.cit., 18.

14 Ibid., 19.
turned persona’s Stoic dignity into theological gravitas. They confirmed its meta-
physical status, transferred it from man to divinity and then reflected it back onto
humanity. It was an instance of ideology’s ‘double mirroring’ strategy. The God
of three personalities creates man in his image. Human personality, mirroring the
Godhead, has divine provenance. The dignity God gives to humanity returns to
divinity creating the perfect ideological circle sustaining both divine creativity
and humanity’s metaphysical provenance. But the person is not an individual yet.
It does not have the material qualities of the physical human being and cannot be
reduced to them. The person differs and is distinct from his own nature. We are
made in the image and likeness of God only in our quality as persons, when all the
specificities and infirmities of nature that make us unique have been abstracted.
In this sense, the theological person becomes the progenitor of the metaphysical
human.
Something similar happened to the Greek prosopon. The Greeks did not create
a term equivalent to the legal persona. The prosopon remained a dramatic device
until the sixth century when it was used in Justinian’s Constitutions and Compila-
tions to translate back into Greek the Latin persona in a typical case of linguis-
tic counter-loan. This translation back of the persona, the Latin for the original
prosopon, invested the term with metaphysical weight. The legal persona was the
foundation of the metaphysical personality. The dignity attributed to the person
abstracted, generalized and sacralized the earthly and modest legal personality.
The cross-fertilization of law and religion, of matters practical and metaphysi-
cal, continued in the Middle Ages. Roman law was rediscovered and after the
Gregorian revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries it became applicable
throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Medieval jurists systematized, simplified
and Christianized the person, turning it into a legal and theological hybrid. This
complex unity is reflected in the Christian version of the homo duplex of body and
soul, flesh and spirit, substance and form. God was mirrored in the moral person
who prepared humanity’s task of imitatio Christi. The imago dei became the
work of salvation for human beings and the mark of their unity. As Cassidorus put
it in Psalm VII, ‘the person is a rational substance, indivisible and individual’.15
Normative universalism, moral equality and spiritual fraternity have deeply
religious roots. The spread of monotheistic religions uprooted social and cul-
tural traditions and disseminated the idea of a common humanity. Christianity
moved history towards spiritual universalism and secular imperialism. For the
early Fathers, all humans are united in Christ and could be saved if they accept
his message. These claims reflect the belief in divine unity upon which the one
‘Apostolic and Catholic Church’ is founded. But as an image only of God, we are
confronted by a dark underside. The Second Commandment bans the creation of
graven images and the Ninth prohibits lust and coveting. They remind humanity
of its duty to obey the law and threaten sin and defiance with dire consequences.
The precaution is understandable. In both Judaic and Christian creation myths,
15 As cited in ibid., 20.

humanity is born out of an act of original disobedience inscribed on the body, the
depository of sin. The splitting of body and soul created a vulnerable and revers-
ible hierarchy of spirit over flesh.
The sharp separation and juxtaposition of celestial and terrestrial worlds and
the primacy accorded to the former prepared the grounds for their reversal.
Reason, science and bodily experience eventually triumphed over revelation and
faith. For Descartes, the I, the thinking thing and fountain of all knowledge,
is not contaminated by local or historical factors. As res cogitans, the mind’s
contents become targets of meditation and reflection. But its spatial and temporal
variations – the persona as mask – endanger the metaphysical stability. Kant’s
metaphysics aimed to solve this difficulty by turning the eternal soul into the
transcendental ego: the unconditioned, unknown and free self that persists across
cultures and forms the ground of thought and action. While outside experience,
it conditions all experience remaining identical across time. The business of
philosophy is to understand the mind’s universal structure and analyse its
component intuitions, ideas and categories of thought.
Modern personhood gradually abandoned its theological provenance and
turned secular. The juridical persona was united with the metaphysical person.
The proud pronouncement of the eighteenth-century revolutions that ‘all men
are born free and equal’ announced the merger. Not only are humans free and
equal – metaphysical – persons; they also enjoy the material privileges of legal
personality. Legal rights turn metaphysical qualities into legal entitlement. As
Marcel Mauss put it, ‘each of us has our self (moi), an echo of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man which predated both Kant and Fichte’.16 The final unity of
legal mask and universal morality was the work of German idealism. The idea of
autonomy brings together law, rationality and morality. This strange marriage,
perfected by Kant, turned the person into an end in itself, someone with free will
whose actions are capable of legal and moral imputation. Kant added autonomy
to the attributes of personhood; a person through rational action legislates a
universal moral law for himself. This way, consciousness and conscience,
reason and morality, were coupled. Their identification ‘began as early as the
seventeenth century, when the person was defined epistemologically as a being
with consciousness’.17 This was the trajectory that led eventually to human rights.
The legal person became first moralized as the philosophical embodiment of
universal value; from that beginning emerged the eighteenth-century distinction
between man and citizen and the twentieth-century ‘human’ of human rights.
A second complementary trajectory runs from Thomas Hobbes to John
Locke, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. It retained the separation and subjected
the homo to the persona. Hobbes was key in this development. He exploited the
legal distinction between a corporation and its legal representatives and built his
16 Ibid., 22.
17 Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory
(Cambridge University Press 1999) 11.
political philosophy around the permutations of legal ‘personation’ and theatrical
representation.18 The double meaning of persona as mask and representation
allowed Hobbes to distinguish between the natural and the artificial person who
can represent others. ‘A person is he whose words or actions are considered either
as his own or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other
thing to whom they are attributes, whether truly or by fiction’.19 The person is
a representative not a moral universal. The ‘representer’ acts; his decisions are
attributed to the represented. Law’s fiction enables someone to stand in for the
Church or a corporation and assigns his acts and liabilities to the institution.
The act of representation by an authorized actor or artificial person unites the
multitude, for it is ‘the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented
that maketh the person one’.20 For the nominalist Hobbes, social unity cannot
result from solidarity, social cooperation or communal belonging but from the
fictive unity of representation and delegation.
Hobbes’ detailed examination of legal personality lies behind his theory of
sovereignty. The Leviathan is an artificial person who performs a legal and the-
atrical representation. As ‘representer’ or ‘personator’, the sovereign binds the
represented turning the tumultuous many into the united oneness of political
people. The Leviathan, as mortall God, represents the subjects who have brought
him into being contractually and gives them personality. His actions create both
individual legal persons and the people as body politic. Without the sovereign,
the division and public recognition of self, indispensable preconditions of per-
sonhood, are absent. Leviathan decides and acts; his actions are attributed to the
subjects who must obey the decisions of their creation as their own. The omnipo-
tent sovereign can deprive his subjects of legal personality and return them to the
status of mere humans. The sovereign law-giver is the ultimate corporate person
or communitas, a creation of legal protocols. Locke or Rousseau developed more
democratic theories of government but the basic function of separation of homo
from persona, initially examined by Hobbes, still forms the foundation of political
representation.
John Locke was the empirical philosopher who gave the person its metaphysi-
cal patina in this line of thinking. To be a person is to be self-conscious, an entity
that considers itself as itself, the same thinking thing across time and space. Self-
consciousness extends temporally and spatially and enables me to experience my
life as a unified whole with past, present and future and a narrative or biologico-
sociological line running through it. Consciousness must be accompanied by con-
science, a sense of moral responsibility and legal liability. The person is therefore a
moral being capable of understanding its subjection to law and therefore becom-
ing subject of law. The emphasis on the unity of the mental and moral capacities
is pronounced. The continuity of character, of beliefs and desires, of actions and
attributions becomes the key characteristic of personality. The older legal part of
18 Hobbes, op.cit., Chapter XVI ‘Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated’.
19 Ibid., 106.
20 Ibid., 109.
the person becomes hidden under the verbosity of unity of intellect and morality.
But it keeps eating away at the metaphysical artefact. The idea and practice of a
united person, the basis of methodological and possessive individualism, crowns
the coming of modernity and capitalism but will not last for long. The political
technology of personhood, that is the ability to separate inside from outside and
differentiate among those included, is too significant and useful to be abandoned
in the name of metaphysics.
Jeremy Bentham and James Mill followed a different strategy of doubling. They
reified the body and placed it at the disposal of the higher faculties – soul, mind or
reason. Once the body has been turned into a thing, it became the property of the
person. Everyone has property over his own body and over the fruit of his labour.
As a result, we can alienate, buy and sell, both our capacity to work and its produce.
The rational part is elevated – ‘personalized’ – while the animal or bodily part deni-
grated. The person, the higher part, engenders the thing out of himself. A long legal
tradition protected the body and its parts from commercial exploitation. Roman
law distinguished between persons and things; only things could be owned, bought
and sold. The body formed a third legal category: a thing beyond ownership and
commerce (res extra commercium). This principle has been in retreat for some con-
siderable time, with contemporary courts and legislatures authorizing the growing
market in body organs, the availability of wombs for hire and extensive intervention
and engineering of genetic material. Yet, this commodification of the body extends
and modifies the earlier legal position. Giving the body an air of sacredness and
declaring it off commercial limits converted flesh into thing, albeit initially a res
extra commercium. The ‘sacred’ objectification of the body would then mutate into
commercial and marketable property. As Anna Grear argues, ‘liberal theory renders
the body a commodifiable object’. Not only that. This ‘self-ownership’ of the body
provides the foundation for the ‘ownership of the external world – which is, like the
body, relegated to object status’.21 Separating the I into homo and person, body
and spirit, allowed the person to reify and claim ownership over the not-I: body
and flesh, its capacities and products and, by extension, the ‘objective’ world. The
intimate relationship between legal person and property undermined the marriage
of convenience of personality with moral universalism.
Hegel rejected the Kantian division between phenomena and things-in-
themselves and historicized the ego. The I is a ‘unity which is self-identical,
and can abstract from all particular determination in order to concentrate on its
self-identity’. But the I is also a particularity, its characteristics are not merely
given but
belong to a being who is capable to abstracting from them and making them
over … while free from these characteristics, the I is not free from having
some; it cannot be without affirming some character or other, hence the
universal must issue in the particular.22
21 Anna Grear, Redirecting Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) 66.

22 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge University Press 1975) 298–9.
For the Hegelians, the ‘transposition of the “I” as ground of consciousness
from Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception to the embodied individual is
the result of historical evolution and the basis of individualism’.23
Laissez-faire capitalism operated and strengthened economic differentiation,
exploitation and domination, paying lip service to Christian moral universalism.
Legal personality became again a mechanism for hierarchizing and grading moral
dignity. The law rejected pre-modern holism and communitarianism as well as
socialist solidarity. The social or cultural belonging of people was demoted to the
private sphere. Public – legal – personality, identified with property, combined
the sovereign god, the sovereign state and the sovereign self. It was against this
kind of conservative personalism that the young Hegelians and Marx rebelled.
They rejected the grandiose metaphysics of subjectivity and separated subject from
person emphasizing the empirical particularity of the individual. ‘While the [eight-
eenth] century associated individualism with the doctrine of free competition, the
[nineteenth] associated it with the division of labour among differently endowed
individuals. The earlier was an individualism of equality, the later an individualism
of inequality’.24 The young Hegelians accepted self-consciousness as an attribute
of the person but ‘attacked the idea of personality as it was used to support a
restorationist political theology that they identified with authoritarian monarchy,
asocial egoism, political apathy, and atomistic individualism’.25
The Roman distinction between persona and homo and the Christian between
body and soul allegedly collapsed after the eighteenth-century revolutions and
the positivization of natural rights. The turn towards natural rights as well as
the new subjectivism of legal theory crossed out the historical provenance of
the person. The French and American revolutionary documents declared that all
men are born free and equal, extending the privileges of legal personality to all
and turning them into rights. But only some were given citizenship, the modern
political version of legal personality. If the link between moral personality and
property led to the modern possessive individual, that between legal personality
and politics led to the emergence of the citizen. Personality became an integral
part of identity bringing together matter and spirit, legal person and universal
morality. It was bestowed however only on the privileged citizens, the white,
proper and property-owning men. Legal personality added a second nature of
social roles, benefits and entitlements to some humans only.
The turn from Christian natural law to the natural rights of individuals aligned
the person with the functional requirements of emerging capitalism. Treating the
self as owner of body and labour was commensurate to seeing it as the possessor
of natural rights. The creeping individualism of capitalism was reproduced in the
consciousness of the person and the annals of law. The two parts of the homo
duplex with their juxtapositions and hierarchy were inserted into the modern
23 Steven Collins, ‘Categories, Concepts of Predicaments? Remarks on Mauss’s Use of Philo-

sophical Terminology’, in Carrithers, Collins and Lukes, op.cit., 59–60.
24 Breckman, op.cit., 13.
25 Ibid., 15.
legal person. Liberal philosophy inherited the Christian divide between body and
soul and adjusted the legal tradition accordingly. For orthodox naturalism, the
union of body and soul subjected fallen flesh to the soul’s power for redemption.
The Christian reaches his telos, purpose and end, on the deathbed as he surveys
his whole life from the perspective of salvation. Legal natural and human rights
are similar manifestations of the work of salvation.
Nevertheless the ontological centrality of the Fall, the originality and persis-
tence of sin did not evaporate. In the wars against heathen and Moors, against
the indigenous in the new lands and in the civil wars of Christianity, the faithful
encountered the inescapability and effectiveness of evil. The unity of the divided
self under the direction of its spiritual part was one only possibility. The propen-
sity to sin of naked life survived the separation between rational nature and its
inferior animal part. The person is not the union between body and spirit but
what in the human is in excess and correction of the body. The person separates
the living being from itself, creating superior and inferior parts. Those who pri-
oritize body over spirit must be corrected, converted or eliminated. The origi-
nal exclusions behind the category of the legal person are now generalized and
attributed to the whole humanity. There is body and there is soul; those who do
not subject flesh to spirit cannot be redeemed.
We can conclude that the persona or mask is different from the wearer; its
superimposed image places the bearer in a regulated space and gives him a role
or character which designates functions and powers, privileges and duties. Some-
one masked becomes a ritually organized set of practices. Self and self-with-mask
differ. The persona both reveals and conceals the masked self; self is not present
but represented. This representation operates in limited and well-regulated con-
ditions, in ancestral worship, theatrical performance, later in legal disputation.
Eventually the prosopon in a metonymical transference came to signify the face
and the general comportment of the body turning the artifice into the original. By
further analogical extension, it came to mean the (actor’s) act of re-presentation
(anti-prosopeia in Greek). The prosopon, initially an act of trickery or masquerade
making someone what he is not on stage or in life, became the mask and inner-
most secret of self.
After the person’s metaphysical transubstantiation two trajectories opened. One
continued its utilization as a technology of separation and division. The second
associates the person with a metaphysical or scientific conception of human nature;
for the metaphysicians, the person’s significance lies in its divine provenance and
moral patrimony. The secularists insist on the person’s unity, continuity over time
and permanence over space and explore the contents of consciousness and con-
science. Both forget the legal provenance and constructed character of the person.
Power and wealth have used personhood as a technology of separation and divi-
sion. After the interval of the united self, these technologies are coming back. They
no longer divide persons from things, or free men from slaves. They are redefining
what it means to be human, giving personhood to actants and hybrids, androids
and replicants, computer programs and animals, and depriving specific categories of
humans from its consolations. The epoch of the post-human is that of the revenge
of the legal person against its metaphysical mimic.
2 The story of dignitas
In June 2012, I participated in an invitation-only Oxford conference on dig-

nity sponsored by the Catholic Church.1 It was a strange occasion. The theo-
logians, moral philosophers, legal academics and judges present were benignly
and absent-mindedly overlooked by senior clerics of the Church. The evangelical
theologians stuck to their argument about God’s gift of human life and soon
retreated to their beloved topics of abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, body
parts harvesting and the like. We were reminded that dignity is a quaint synonym
for the sacredness of life with great ideological significance in the American cul-
ture wars. As all solid ideology, the commitment to the sacredness of life has pal-
pable material effects. It has led to the murder and persecution of gynaecologists
and family planning clinics, the cancellation of medical research, the banning of
contraception. Having a conference in Oxford was perhaps a way of conducting
these faux-theological debates in a serene academic environment removed from
the heat of vitriolic attacks and criminal actions. The so-called ‘pro-life’ argument
has not poisoned to a similar extent the European public sphere, as the referen-
dum on abortion in Ireland clearly showed. Listening to the impassioned argu-
ments against abortion and genetic material research was for many of us as exotic
as following disputations about the gender – or indeed sexuality – of angels. The
experience was unedifying and informative. It allowed the Europeans academics
to exchange knowing looks and smiles.
I was bemused by this unexpected emergence of dignity as a concept of central
theological and philosophical importance. What did some of the better-known
liberal philosophers have to do with these disturbing theological exchanges? Why
has dignity become a favourite dish on the philosophical menu? What unites
backwoodsmen evangelicals with some of the finer philosophical minds? Were we
witnessing a belated reconciliation between religious fanatics and secular liberals
or was it just a temporary marriage of convenience against a common enemy?
The liberal turn to dignity has been gaining momentum recently, even though
its particular Oxford format was bizarre. Over the last few years, a number of
1 Christopher McCrudden (ed.), Understanding Human Dignity (OUP 2014).

The story of dignitas 23
books by liberal luminaries, such as Jürgen Habermas,2 Jeremy Waldron,3 Michael
Rosen4 and George Kateb5 have signposted dignity as the liberal flavour of the
month. Conferences, workshops, lectures and essays accompanied the emergence
of a concept that had scarcely bothered the constitutional, philosophical or legal
debates in the past. Yet we now have people giving dignity all types of important
tasks. Some are anthropological, others moral or legal. Dignity is the founda-
tion of (human) rights; the content of (human) rights; the purpose of a liberal
legal system; or, its moral justification. Grand claims are accompanied by even
grander argumentative strategies. The obvious question is why, if dignity has
such significance in the justificatory armour of Western law and human rights, it
has surfaced only recently and has not accumulated the wealth of commentary
and exaggeration that follow concepts such as ‘human’, ‘humanity’ or ‘freedom’.
The emergence of dignity as a master concept of Western law was rather belated.
The genealogy and argumentative strategies around dignity are similar to those
we examined in relation to person. Let me briefly examine the history of the
concept. It appeared in Rome but not in Athens. Classical and modern Greek do
not have a corresponding term. Dignitas was a Roman juridico-political concept
and signified someone’s status or rank. Dignitates – the term appeared usually in
the plural – denoted office, role and service, aristocratic provenance as well as the
honours and privileged that accompanied each office. The magistrate, the senator
or the sacerdos enjoyed different privileges. As Teresa Iglesias put it,
the idea of dignitas was central to Roman political and social life and closely
related to the meaning of honor. Political offices and as a consequence the
persons holding them, like that of a senator, or the emperor, had dignitas.6
Dignitates demanded self-discipline, generosity, a sense of duty and a certain

grandeur. Ordinary citizens and the plebs did not have dignity; the res publica
did. Indeed dignitas was also the first of four genres of public discourse
according to Ad Herrenium, the Roman textbook on rhetoric.7 Dignitas had
therefore political, ethical, aesthetic and ceremonial aspects: it identified offices,
it differentiated among them, it endowed their holders with powers, duties and
privileges, finally, it united the city in honour.
2 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human
Rights’ (2010) 41(4) Metaphilosophy 464.
3 Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights (OUP 2012).
4 Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Harvard University Press 2012).
5 George Kateb, Human Dignity (Harvard University Press 2011).
6 Teresa Iglesias, ‘Bedrock Truths and the Dignity of the Individual’ (2001) 4(1) Logos:
A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 114, 120–1.
7 Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης, Περι Αξιοπρέπειας (On Dignity) (Indictos 2000, in Greek). Kondy-
lis’s Dignity (axioprepeia in Greek) examines the history of the concept and has been a useful
source for this chapter.
Cicero started the move towards a conception of dignity that refers to the
inner life by contrasting dignitas with voluptas – desire. Man’s position in the
polis underwrites his position in the world. It was a development that started
with Plato. Man’s purpose is the quest for knowledge through a turn to God;
for Aristotle and the Romans, human superiority is the result of bios politikos
or vita activa, a concept that could be seen as a first approximation to dignity.
Similarly γνωθει σεαυτον or self-knowledge and understanding of man’s purpose
could be seen as a precondition of dignity. Stoicism and Neo-Platonism prepared
therefore the adoption of dignitas by Christian theology. The original meaning
was transformed and started its long journey towards a unitary and ontological
conception of the term. Human dignity was seen as a consequence of the omoio-
sis, the likeness between God and man. As we saw, for the Fathers of the Church
humanity has two natures: the spiritual and the material. The body is given to
sin, a symptom of the original sin and the fall. As a result, man is the victim and
perpetrator of sin. But the incarnation of Christ raised humanity into an agent of
its own redemption. Theological and political developments in the late Middle
Ages brought the two sides together and moved dignity away from hierarchical
status and rank towards a universal human attribute. The complex theology of
sacred life was gradually transferred into a celebration of universal reason and
morality. A similar move expanded the scope of dignity from the limited group
of nobility and property owners towards legal universality, a status that could be
extended to all.
Ontologically, however, dignity is related to spirit not to flesh. Man is predomi-
nantly a spiritual being. Incarnate Christ is perfect God and perfect man, one of
the three persons of the Trinity. When Boaventura and Thomas associated dig-
nity with persona, a secular form was given to the divine substance.8 A close link
started developing between dignity, rationality and free will. Manetti, Ficino and
Pico della Mirandola inherited and developed Christian metaphysics in a humanist
direction.9 Pico radicalized Ficino’s idea about the universal character of human-
ity and argued that man can transform himself using his freedom to become the
highest or the basest being. This was also Marx’s idea in the early manuscripts:
humanity transcends itself by changing the conditions that determine its existence.
Nevertheless the separation between the theological and the political concep-
tions of dignity survived in the Middle Ages. Theologically dignity tends towards
universalism; socially and politically it promotes hierarchies of status and power.
Spiritual dignity, the similitude of man with God, justified a politically stratified
social structure. A clear distinction was therefore drawn between office and office-
holders. It legitimized feudal social hierarchies, since the misbehaviour of the
officer did not affect the dignity or the life of the office. The dignity of office does
not pass with its bearer; this was especially the case with Pope or Emperor, who
are God’s representatives on earth. This distinction between public office and
8 Ibid., 32–3.
9 Ibid., 49–56.
office-holder survived in modernity, continuing the juxtaposition between two
conceptions, a universalizing spiritual and a socio-political differentiating dignity.
Eventually the earlier sharp distinction, which had supported God-given value
over political divisions and privileges, came to an end. The French Declaration
of the Rights of Man and Citizen formally terminated hereditary and privileged
access to office. Article 6 stated that all citizens are equal and can be admitted to
all dignités, places et emplois publics, according to their capacities and without any
other distinction except for that of their virtues and talents. Differentiations and
hierarchies remained, as this book amply testifies. But they could no longer be
legitimized by the divine provenance of dignity.
Philosophical dignity
Petrarch was the first to use the new meaning of dignity, not departing, how-
ever, from the Christian position. This started changing with Marsilio Ficino,
for whom the metaphysical foundation of dignity is found in Neo-Platonism and
hermeticism. Man’s soul at the centre of being links both with animals below and
looks above to pure spirit and God. God is the stimulus for man’s higher endeav-
our and offers a criterion for comparison. Dignity, coming from God, represents
active human nature and rejects all servitude. Pico della Mirandola radicalized
Ficino’s view about the universality of human nature. Man shapes himself through
his freedom, which can lead him to become the highest or the lowest of beings.
Here we find the beginnings of humanism as a celebration of freedom and the
universality of humanity. The Christian provenance of the metaphysics of dignity
and the double anthropology of fall and redemption, matter and spirit, kept the
rationalist Enlightenment away from the idea. Only Pufendorf constructed close
links between a secularized concept of dignity and the anthropology of reason.
His socio-political conception linked dignity with honour or valour. Rationality
demands that man follows certain moral rules found in natural law. Natural law
and dignity form a unity, as does reason and dignity. In his attempt to social-
ize natural law, Pufendorf linked humanity with dignity: In ipso quippe hominia
vocabulo indi catur inesse aliqua dignatio – the word ‘hominis’ shows that there is
dignity in human nature.10 In the process, self-respect becomes respect for others
because all are born free and equal.
Grotius and Hobbes scarcely mentioned the concept. For the Dutch sage,
dignity, natural law and reason are intimately linked but peripherally discussed.
The long road towards the redefinition of dignity as reason instead of soul had
started in earnest but did not become a major topic of contemplation. The phi-
losophers argued both against claims of man’s proximity with God and against
the story of the original and inevitable sin. It was that claim which soon became
the basis for a naturalistic explanation of human folly. They were opposed both
to man’s likeness with God and the opposite claim that humanity is just natural.
10 Quoted in ibid., 59.

They attacked both asceticism and Puritanism and the claim that man is fully
immersed in natural determination. Such a belief would undermine free will.
Enlightenment reason attacked therefore those who exaggerate the extent of
human mastery and those who forget the animal side of human nature. As David
Hume put it,
some exalt our species to the skies, and represent man as a kind of human
demigod, who derives his origin from heaven, and retains evident marks of
his lineage and descent. Others insist upon the blind sides of human nature,
and can discover nothing, except vanity, in which man surpasses the other
animals.11
Scepticism and relativism followed the demotion by some and elevation

by others of man’s status. It was this view that Kant attacked with his sharp
distinction between perfect reason and pathological nature and its corollary a
purely formal moral imperative. A new philosophical and practical prescription
had to recognize and uphold the sensual nature of humanity without losing its
mastery. For secular metaphysics, man is immersed in nature but he is also its
master. Dignity was given the task of resolving, or rather mediating, the paradox.
The transformation in the idea of dignity helped elevate the person from legal
construct into metaphysical value. Dignity turned from the highly individualized
privileges of pre-modern dignitates into the highest and highly indeterminate
modern value. Kant’s succinct and rather vacuous definition of dignity remains
the best we have after three centuries of trying.
[E]verything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be

replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever
is above all price, and therefore admits no equivalent, has a dignity … that
which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an
end in itself has not merely a relative worth, i.e., a price, but has an intrinsic
worth, i.e., dignity.12
For Fichte too ‘the rational being posits itself as a rational individual – from
now on we shall refer to this as the person – by exclusively ascribing to itself a sphere
for its freedom’.13 This is why the moral commandment is categorical and formal;
only formal imperatives can avoid personal motives and individual inclinations
and pathologies. Morality calls for an absolute value or purpose and declares this
11 David Hume, ‘Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’ in David Hume, Selected
Essays (ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar, OUP 1998) 43.
12 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Moral (3rd edn, trans. James Ellington,
Hackett Publishing 1993) 40.
13 J.G. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right (ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur,
CUP 2000) 53.
to be rational man as a replacement of God. Dignity becomes both the motiva-
tion for a morality moved by the legislating reason and the aim of moral action.
Kant’s definition of person and dignity is circular. To be a person is to have dig-
nity, to be an end and not means; dignity is what a person and only a person has.
The rest have a price. To be a person and to have dignity is not to be someone’s
property, but your own, Locke would add. This was the high point of idealism.
As Jeremy Waldron puts it today, dignity is a status that follows all irrespective
of our standing in society. Yet Kant did not forget the association of the term
with nobility. He described the distribution of dignities as a ding that makes its
possessors members of a higher estate even without any special services.14 Only
the dignity of the citizen is universally shared, although of course citizens
were a minority of the population. Kant’s distinction between value and price
has been consistently challenged. His idea that what has value but not price is
dignified forgets that we give a price for all kinds of dignified things like limb,
life or reputation and status in cases of libel and defamation. The law firmly and
comprehensively denies the claim that there is value beyond price.15
But the deceit was even greater. These grandiose claims were made at the point
when humans and their labour became commodities to be sold and bought.
Kant’s distinction was opposed by the operation of capitalism economy. Working
man, whatever his dignity, has value because he and his products have a price.
‘In capitalism, freedom means viewing others as mere means’, writes Axel Hon-
neth.16 Human labour marries subject and object, the I with the not-I, infusing
matter with spirit. The product of labour has use value, it meets a human need; as
a commodity with a price, the human’s power to work can be bought and sold.
Power asymmetries and social relations place some in the position of buyer and
others of seller. Yet, this social relationship is forgotten. The pricing, sale and
control of peoples’ ability to work facilitated the spreading and eventual domina-
tion of capitalism.
Kant’s elevation of dignity – the ‘pricelessness’ of the person – into the human
differentia specifica was a great ideological trick. Schopenhauer attacked it in the
starkest of terms as the slogan of the ‘clueless and ignorant’ moralist who uses
it to conceal the depressing but liberating view that there is no foundation of
morality.
The expression of dignity once used by Kant, became the slogan of clueless
and ignorant moralists who hide behind this imposing expression ‘human
dignity’; the fact that they have no foundation for morality, estimating that
their readers would love to be immersed in such an exalted idea.17
14 Meir Dan-Cohen, ‘Introduction: Dignity and its (Dis)content’ in Waldron op.cit., 4.

15 Don Herzog, ‘Aristocratic Dignity’ in ibid., 99–118.
16 Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism (Polity 2017) 18.
17 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (Hackett 1965) 100, as quoted in Rosen,
op.cit., 1.
The psychologist Steven Pinker repeated the attack in more measured terms
in the early twenty-first century: ‘“dignity” is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly
up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it’.18 Titling his article The
Stupidity of Dignity, Pinker shares the anger of leading bioethicist Ruth Macklin,
who, fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to stop research and therapy,
entitled a 2003 editorial ‘Dignity is a Useless Concept’.19 It is certainly an empty
signifier that has been attached to various opposed signifieds. Dignity,
spawns outright contradictions at every turn. We read that slavery and

degradation are morally wrong because they take someone’s diginity away.
But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or
degrading him, can take his dignity away.20
Lack of physical and juridical knowledge, scoffs W.M. Thorburn at the turn
of the twentieth century, are the causes of the ‘vague and vacuous irrationality
generally shown in the use of the words Person and Personality by modern Moral
Philosophy’. The Kantians ‘are obsessed with an unholy craving to make out
personality as something uniquely and mysteriously magnificent: bracketing
every man with God and impiously degrading the rest of his mundane children’.21
Emile Durkheim agreed. The new ideology of individualism sacralizes the mortal
pathetic individual, creating a new ‘religion of which man is, at the same time,
believer and God’.22 The religion of individualism is that of ‘Kant and Rousseau,
that of the spiritualists, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man’.23
The attack was taken up with gusto by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich
Nietzsche. For the former, as we saw, dignity is a shibboleth of the clueless and
empty-headed moralists. For Nietzsche, such conceptual delusions, unknown to
the Greeks, offer consolation to slaves and tears of sympathy to masters. War as
dignified work, which aims to annihilate dead men, shows how empty of meaning
and contradictory are such slogans.
Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy
products of slavedom hiding itself from itself. Woeful time, in which the
slave requires such conceptions, in which he is incited to think about and
beyond himself…now the slave must vainly scrape from one day to another
with transparent lies recognizable to every one of deeper insight, such as the
18 Steven Pinker, ‘The Stupidity of Dignity’, The New Republic (28 May 2008) <https://
newrepublic.com/article/64674/the-stupidity-dignity> accessed 29 August 2018.
19 Ruth Macklin, ‘Dignity is a Useless Concept’ (2003) 327(7429) British Medical Journal
1419.
20 Pinker, op.cit.
21 W.M. Thorburn, ‘What is a Person?’ (1917) 26(103) Mind 291, 294.
22 Ibid.
23 Emile Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ (trans. Steven Lukes) (1969) 17(1)
Political Studies 14, 20.
alleged ‘equal rights of law’ or the so-called ‘fundamental rights of man’, or
‘the dignity of labour’.24
Moral values are the result of the decline of virtue; dignity a creation of the
ressentiment of unequals, who, having abandoned God, proclaim fake loyalty to
moral values. Nietzsche’s ferocious attack on dignity indicates that the concept
had become an amalgam of everything he hated: ‘humanist, liberal, Christian,
socialist and Kantian ideas’.25
The emergence of human rights downgraded the importance of dignity. The
person, a combination of law, theology and secular metaphysics, was turned into
the citizen in the nineteenth century and the human in the twentieth. Dignity
became humanity. It appears in the United Nations Charter, the Universal
Declaration and the German Federal Constitution; its normative contribution
remained limited. For Jeremy Waldron, dignity is an autonomous legal concept, a
matter of legal rank and status that modernity ‘universalized’. Dignity denies the
existence of difference between black and white, man and woman. We are all now
chiefs, there are no Indians.26 While we don’t always keep faith with this high
principle we are committed to its application.27 Yet as this book argues, status in
law amounts to personhood. Law ascribes status by distributing and enforcing
rights and privileges, powers and duties. Dignity is not therefore the foundation
or content but the outcome of legal ascription; as such it is a highly differentiated
status. Law’s job is to separate and divide: public from private, employer from
worker, landlord from tenant, citizen from alien. The differentiated rights and
duties hierarchize personality and qualify dignity. To be a person is to have rights
and duties and to enjoy dignity; one has more or less dignity according to the
legal rights law has assigned to her.
The Christian provenance and the double anthropology dignity carries never-
theless survived. As individuals, we are unique but also similar to others; as sub-
jects, we are free and sovereign (the metaphysical subjectus), as well as subjected
to legalities and natural determinations (the metaphysical subjectum); as persons,
we are both spirit and matter. Secularization did not destroy but multiplied the
anthropological split. The three characters of humanity, with their double value,
create what we have called the paradoxes of rights.28 All dualisms and juxtaposi-
tions soon acquire axiological significance with one term privileged over the other.
This double anthropology finds its best expression in the dualisms of rights. They
prioritize formal against material entitlements; they propagate universal ideologi-
cal concepts against real needs; they promote a socio-economic system, which
degrades large groups of people while proclaiming universal equality.
24 Nietzsche, ‘The Greek State’ quoted in Rosen op.cit., 43.

25 Ibid., 46.
26 Waldron, op.cit., 47–78.
27 Ibid., 30–6.
28 See Chapter 7.
Similarly, dignity remains ambiguous and neutral, a ‘floating signifier’, like
many other grand values (autonomy, freedom, personhood) promoted as foun-
dations or contents of morality. The concept started as dignitates in the plu-
ral indicating rank and office with their associated powers and privileges. When
Christianity and the Enlightenment moved it towards moral universalism the idea
of rank was hidden but survived. Hierarchy and symbolic power passed from offi-
cial rank to the material circumstances of people; spiritual life, renamed reason,
subjugates the animal bodily part of existence legitimizang status differentiations.
Differentiation according to rank became differentiation according to wealth;
hierarchy according to office became priority according to material privilege.
Dignity remains a combination of rank and status, equality and inequality, only
that the ground of distinction has passed from office to material wealth, and from
service to celebrity. As Simone Weil put it, we can claim that dignity has returned
to a pre-modern conception of differentiated dignitates.29 They are no longer
what is differentially due to political office and honour; they follow the mate-
rial entitlements of wealth and the cultural value of celebrity without observable
merit or contribution to the common good.
But why did dignity return? I can only speculate. Globalization, neoliberalism
and cosmopolitanism rose together after 1989 as the sociological, economic and
political aspect of the ‘new world order’.30 The person as subject, the individual
as profit-maximizer and the transnational citizen are crucial contributors to the
operation and hegemony of the new world dispensation. However, after the Iraq
debacle and the 2008 financial crisis liberal cosmopolitanism retreated, so-called
‘humanitarian wars’ were discredited, neoliberal economics failed. ‘Humanity’ can
no longer act with clear conscience as the normative source of the new world
order. The great wave of protests in 2011–13 did not appeal to human rights
but to social justice. The protesters’ slogans – ‘We are the 99%’, ‘End austerity
and neoliberalism’ – indicated a distancing from the methodological and political
individualism of human rights. At the same time, the emergence of ‘post-secular’
societies and the challenges of new religious fundamentalisms posed a crucial chal-
lenge to the marriage of convenience between Western rationalism, Christianity
and technology. The truce between science and religion has to be reasserted, as
fanatics on both sides try to impose the primacy of one over the other.
There is more. The concept of personhood has splintered and candidates for legal
recognition have proliferated. The human individual and the corporation are no
longer the sole possessors of personality. Animals, trees, the unborn and the dead,
more importantly, AI machines, robots and computer programs are successfully
claiming legal privileges and rights. As a result, the metaphysical uses and returns
of personality have diminished. This is evident in the embarrassment felt by
theorists of personality. The idea that personality is the result of temporally and
spatially extended self-consciousness and conscience can no longer hold. Entities
29 Simone Weil, ‘Human Personality’ in Simone Weil, Selected Essays (OUP 1963).
30 Costas Douzinas, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (Polity 2013).
that cannot qualify under such a strict definition are increasingly introduced into
the personality club. The shift from sovereign power to bio-power involves a
radically different conception of the subject of action or agent; it is endowed
with fundamental interests, which cannot be limited, however, to the simple
legal category of person. The new subject of bio-politics requires new political
technologies more robust than the thin person of law and rights. If, according to
Michel Foucault, the person was a living animal with the additional capacity of
legal existence, now it becomes an entity with legal existence that defines what
is life. The legal person is returning to Rome, its emblematic birthplace: the
person is a technology of separation between included and excluded and division
and hierarchization among those given the status. No clear normative theory
or value determines the process, which follows pragmatic choices, bio-political
technologies and economic prerogatives.
The idea of dignity replaces that of the person, as the contemporary heir to
claims about the sacredness of life. It offers something more abstract, vague and
less soiled by wars that kill humans in order to save humanity. Dignity offers a
reassertion of the close link between secular law and reason on the one hand and
metaphysical value on the other. The ‘sacredness’ of life inscribed in the modern
history of dignity is of great value to religious leaders and cultural warriors and,
with some appropriate adjustments, to liberal philosophers. Its provenance, con-
ceptual structure and historical trajectory bring the two major sources of Western
modernity together. The ‘dignity’ of sovereignty and security has been gradually
replacing the dignity of persons. However, as we will necessarily move away from
the neoliberal order, I suspect that dignity will soon return to its obscure legiti-
matory position as a vague and malleable foundation of law and metaphysics. The
‘dignified’ alternative adds material well-being to the spiritual core and redefines
dignity as the value and honour of the integrated human. Dignity should return
to its Marxian position: the ability of humanity to transcend itself by changing the
conditions determining its nature.
This is the uncomfortable conclusion to what has been a weird and wonderful
journey. Like time or justice, I know when my dignity is trampled on but I have
no idea where its kingdom lies.
3 What is the legal person?
The person: natural or artificial?

The early parts of this book examined the complex genealogy of the person. The
person brings together law and performance, philosophy and religion, metaphysics
and ritual. Contemporary jurisprudence however, with a few exceptions, is
unaware of or uninterested in the history and philosophical provenance of the
legal person. The two versions of the person as a legal construct, the external
manifestation of a specific role and status or, as the morally endowed seat of will,
reason and freedom, are either assumed or repeated unexamined. The law uses
personhood extensively to specify its object but ‘no coherent body of doctrine or
jurisprudential theory exists’.1 One author asks rhetorically whether the concept
of the person is necessary for human rights. His answer is both categorical and
fashionably contemporary. ’Human rights arguments are obscured by their
reliance on the concept of the person ... one set of questions about persons and
personhood [must be replaced] with questions about biological human beings,
consciousness, and rational agency’.2 The distinct genealogies, the theological
and philosophical disputations do not trouble legal philosophy much. This
confusion has been noted by a commentator for whom ‘judges not only fail to
invoke philosophical support for their ideas of personality, but also inconsistently
apply jurisprudential theory in resolving problems of legal personhood’.3
The idea of the person is the building block of legal practice. Plaintiffs and
defendants, corporations and contractors are legal persons. Rights are entitle-
ments and duties are burdens assigned to persons. Legal theory has mainly exam-
ined the potential exclusions the institution of the person introduces, concerned
either to help expand or to police and restrain its proliferation. Case law and
scholarship are in a state of flux and have a casuistic flavour full of ideological
assumptions and logical contradictions. Are foetuses, the mentally disabled and
1 Dave Fagundes, ‘Note, What We Talk About When We Talk About Persons: The Language
of a Legal Fiction’ (2001) 114(6) Harvard Law Review 1745, 1746.
2 Jens David Ohlin, ‘Is the Concept of the Person Necessary for Human Rights?’ (2005) 105
Columbia Law Review 209, 249.
3 Fagundes, op.cit., 1747.
What is the legal person? 33
the comatose persons? Do animals, trees or natural enclaves have rights? Can
human organs and limbs become objects of property and sale or are they integral
parts of personhood? Does the implanted foetus belong to the surrogate or the
genetic mother? Should personhood be extended to primates, artificial intelligence
machines, robots and blade runners? Recent discussions concern the commercial
side of embodied personality. Personhood has entered jurisprudence through its
deconstruction by artificial intelligence, genetic technologies and bio-ethics and
its co-optation by big business.
Has the old separation of homo from persona disappeared? Is the legal person
identical with the empirical human being? How does the person relate to those
other classifications of humanity, the subject and the individual? Before the recent
turn towards human rights and normative jurisprudence, legal theory was clear.
Personality is a technical legal construct. John Austin stated the position succinctly
in his Lectures on Jurisprudence. ’Mere legal persons (Personae Juris) are persons
by a figment, and for the sake of brevity in discourse. All rights reside in, and all
duties are incumbent upon, physical or natural Persons’.4 The term ‘figment’ or,
the more common ‘legal fiction’, is an implicit recognition of the birth of the
person as mask. The legal person is a creation of law denoting a rights-holding
and duties-bearing entity. Like its Roman ancestor, contemporary personhood is
a point of condensation of legal relations and imputations, something that comes
to life socially not naturally. Collective, artificial and non-existent entities, those
not yet born or not still alive, can acquire legal personality if the law chooses to
give them rights and duties. ‘There are no logical of formal limits to who or even
what might be considered a suitable subject for the bearing of rights and duties’.5
If the human comes to life at birth, the legal person emerges in a second birth
or legal baptism, which endows an entity, any entity, with the mask and roles of
legal recognition. ‘It is not the natural Ego’, writes Hannah Arendt, ‘which enters
a court of law. It is a right-and-duty-bearing person, created by the law, which
appears before the law’.6
Hans Kelsen, the greatest legal theorist of the twentieth century, was the most
consistent and persuasive expositor of this view. He sharply distinguished between
humans and persons:
that the human being is legal subject (subject of rights and obligations) means
nothing else … but that human behaviour is the content of legal obligations
and rights … the so-called physical person, then, is not a human being, but
the personified unity of the legal norms that obligate or authorise one and
the same human being. It is not a natural reality but a social construction
4 John Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence (ed. Robert Campbell, The Lawbook Exchange
2005) XII, Vol. I, 364.
5 Ngaire Naffine, Law’s Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal Person
(Hart 2009) 7.
6 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Viking Press 1965) 107.
created by the science of law – an auxiliary concept in the presentation of
legally relevant facts. In this sense a physical person is a juristic person.7
Or, as Richard Tur puts it, the legal person is an ‘empty slot that can be filled
by anything that can have rights or duties’.8
The law gives powers and duties to a human in the same way it does to a com-
pany, association or state. In this sense, the natural legal person is more artificial
than the corporation, because its status as human obscures what is perfectly visible
in the company: they are both artificial legal constructs. Kelsen again:
the natural person is not a human being, but the personalised combina-
tion of legal rules which impose obligations and give entitlements to one
and the same person. It is not a natural entity but a legal construct created
by the science of law, an ancillary concept for the description and creation
of the elements of law.9
The person, instead of being the centre of law, is a logical space or quilting
point. It brings together and combines a patchwork of norms, rules, relations
and remedies, which create a unique group of rights and duties. A legal person
is a trope, the personification of a bunch of publicly recognized social relations.
It forms the canvas upon which different legal states and statuses will be painted.
In this sense, legal rules do not address real people, but juridical personalities. As
Tim Murphy put it, ‘the legal subject presents “itself” to the law as a face, or a
surface, which is to say a screen on to which various projections will be effected’.10
A human without personality – before its acquisition or after its loss – is a legally
bare life. This analysis of personhood fits perfectly Giorgio Agamben’s distinction
between bios and zoe. Humans with legal personality have public recognition and
enjoy the privileges of life as bios, as they did in Athens and Rome. Those without
belong to zoe and are often reduced to the status of homines sacri. Refugees, sans
papiers migrants or the prisoners in Guatanamo Bay, with limited legal rights and
protections, are juridical semi-persons or non-persons.
Normative jurisprudence rejects this view. To be a person is to share certain
characteristics which exist prior to and independently of legal intervention. Per-
sons are rational agents. The liberal personality possesses will, reason and free-
dom. A person desires, deliberates, decides and acts. Will first. The Argentinian
legal philosopher Carlos Nino analysed the legal person from a neo-Kantian
perspective.11 For Nino, will is what brings persons together without being
7 Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State (Harvard University Press 1949) 33.
8 Richard Tur, ‘The “Person” in Law’ in Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillet (eds), Persons and
Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry (Basil Blackwell 1987) 121.
9 Kelsen, op.cit., 93.
10 W.T. Murphy, The Oldest Social Science? Configurations of Law and Modernity (OUP
1997) 196.
11 Carlos Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights (Clarendon Press 1993).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
a delight and a disappointment.... Shaw takes up the empty bladders
of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of
rodomontade, the hollow conventions, and the sham sentiments;
quietly he inserts his pin; and the thing collapses with a pop.”
The play was given six special matinée performances at the
London Court Theater in the latter part of 1904, and Arnold Daly has
since presented it in America.
THE NOVELS AND OTHER
WRITINGS
SHAW’S four published novels both suffer and gain by the
widespread public interest in his plays; gain because this interest
serves to keep them somewhat in the foreground, and suffer
because, as the work of a very young man, they are ill-fitted to stand
comparison with the literary offspring of his maturity. Of the four,
“Love Among the Artists” is the best and “Cashel Byron’s Profession”
the most popular. “An Unsocial Socialist” is a wild extravaganza that
has lived its day and done its task, and “The Irrational Knot” is
forgotten. The author’s first novel, written in his early twenties, has
never seen the light. The publishers of that time would have none of
it, and later on, when Shaw “copy” began to find a market and there
even arose a mild demand for it, Shaw wisely decided that the
yellowing manuscript should remain in the twilight of its tomb.
The hero of “Cashel Byron’s Profession” has become one of the
most familiar characters of latter-day fiction. References to him are
made in the newspapers frequently and every time a star of the
roped arena marries a chorus girl the love making of Mr. Byron is
recalled. He was not the first bruiser to grace the pages of an
English romance—as admirers of “Pendennis” and The Spectator
well know—but he has become, by long odds, the most
conspicuous. It is to be deplored that Shaw did not save him for a
play. “The Admirable Bashville,” a burlesque dramatization of the
novel, does not answer. Cashel should be the hero of a melodrama a
la “Arms and the Man.” What an opportunity he would give to our
Greek god stars!
Cashel is the son of an actress and becoming tired of her
variable moods and the exactions of his instructors, runs away from
boarding school in England and journeys to Australia. There, by
chance, he is taken into the household of Mr. “Ned” Skene, an
eminent retired pugilist, as secretary and gymnasium assistant. The
alert Skene discerns in him a rare “find” and before long he is back in
England again, battling his way to fame and fortune.
Before long, through one Lord Worthington, a man of vast
acquaintance and catholic taste, Cashel is introduced to the notice of
Miss Lydia Carew, a young Englishwoman of huge fortune and most
marvellous intellectuality. It is not until page 189—more than half
way through the 330 page book—that Lydia learns that Cashel is a
prize-fighter. Very naturally she recoils from him, but all the while,
half-unconsciously, she has been falling desperately in love with him,
and in the end, despite his profession, she marries him.
“I practically believe,” she explains to his rejected rival, “in the
doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly
active, I think my impulse toward a man strong in body and
untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it
is a plain proposition in eugenics.”
And so Cashel retires from the ring and gradually, though never
completely, takes on the polish of civilization. It is a union so happy
that it soon descends into the commonplace.
The author was born with the dramatic instinct of a Sardou or a
Hal Reid and throughout the book there are scenes of tremendous
excitement and clatter. Cashel fights fairly terrific battles—among
others one with Miss Carew’s footman, Bashville, who also loves her
—and the general air of the book is distinctly warlike. Most of the
minor characters are commonplace. Skene and his wife and Lord
Worthington are old friends from Thackeray and Lucian Webber,
Lydia’s cousin and unsuccessful Romeo, is the ready-made rising
young statesman of contemporary English fiction.
“An Unsocial Socialist” is a tract born of the nights that Shaw
passed in pondering the philosophies. All of the ten articles in the
manifesto of 1845 are preached in it, and in addition there is much
that the Hon. “Tom” Watson, the Hon. Eugene Debs, and various
other earnest gentlemen were destined to spout forth years later. “I
suppose,” says Max Beerbohm, “that there is not under heaven a
subject on which Shaw has not thought deeply and indignantly.” “An
Unsocial Socialist” justifies this venture. It is the most riotous hodge-
podge of cart-tail oratory and low comedy in the language.
Sidney Trefusis, a millionaire, takes to wife Henriette Jansenius,
the daughter of a millionaire, and after a brief honeymoon bids her
good-bye. He is no ordinary money-king, this strange young man,
but a Rothschild with the ideas of a Marx. The times, he decides, are
out of joint. Things have grown rotten in Denmark. To live as men of
his fortune live would be to give his tacit consent to the immoral
scheme of things. And so he deserts his wife, assumes the name of
Smilash, and going to a small country town, sets up shop as the
local jack-of-all-trades.
From this point on, for a hundred pages, the book is a socialist
tract. To his wife, who pursues him, and to everyone else he
encounters—the faculty and student body of a refined young ladies’
seminary, the village politicians, chance passersby, enemies, and
friends—he expounds his theories. Also—and this is what makes
him rise from the common level of propagandists—he practices
many (though not all) of the things he preaches. In the end, his
neglect kills his wife and he goes ranging England in search of a real
affinity. When he finds her he marries her and the book ends—with a
most marvellous letter from the hero to the author.
As in the case of “The Philanderer” a great many persons have
wondered how Shaw could make such a ridiculous character of a
man whose doctrines apparently coincide with his own. In truth, it is
highly improbable that Shaw, or any other sane man, ever held to the
ideas expressed by Trefusis. The latter’s speech beside the corpse
of his wife is without parallel in fiction. And some of his other
utterances and acts—how royally and deliciously sacrilegious they
are! Certainly an age that finds Schopenhauer’s essay on women a
never-ending delight should be better acquainted with the ecstatic
shocks of “An Unsocial Socialist.” Trefusis, being utterly beyond the
pale, is as productive of wicked little thrills to the orthodox and
virtuous as McIntosh Jellaludin, David, Pantagruel, or the latest
popular murderer.
“The Irrational Knot”—the theme of which is evident from the title
—is now but a name. It was one of a vast multitude of similar books
that saw the light at the time of its birth. Not one of the reviewers,
eulogists or enemies of Shaw seems to think much of it. “Love
Among the Artists,” on the contrary, is a novel that deserves to rank
with the really important fiction of the time. The theme is not
startlingly original and in the 400-odd pages there are oceans of
tiresome talk, but the work, as a whole, bears the stamp of
distinction, and if only for the admirable searching portrait of the
Polish pianiste, Aurélie Szczympliça, it deserves some share of
attention.
The story has the amiably discursive cast of the other Shaw
stories and ill bears translation into a brief summary. Adrian Herbert,
an artist, is a character about whom others, in a sense, revolve,
though, in himself, he is little interesting. At the start he is affianced
to Mary Sutherland, a young woman of artistic longings. The chief
business of the book is to show how he is won away from Mary by
the Szczympliça and duly and regularly married by that remarkable
young woman. As for Mary, she finds consolation in the arms of John
Hoskyn, an eminently practical and matter-of-fact gentleman, who
wanders into Bohemia quite by accident, and is much astonished by
what he sees there.
Shaw was a newcomer in Bohemia himself when he wrote this
book and to this fact may be ascribed the freshness and virility of
some of the characters—the Szczympliça in particular, and Owen
Jack, the eccentric composer. In the former the vagaries of the
artistic mind are revealed with considerable originality and delicacy.
If he was tempted to make a burlesque of the soulful little Aurélie, he
kept a tight rein upon the impulse. Jack, on the contrary, is frankly a
figure out of low comedy. Nothing more grotesque than his struggles
with the Philistines is to be found in any of the Shaw plays. Like
Cashel Byron, he and Aurélie deserve to be translated from the
closet to the stage. Jack especially is sufficiently obvious to give any
comedian of fair talents the opportunity of a lifetime.
Shaw’s pair of critical pamphlets—“The Perfect Wagnerite” and
“The Quintessence of Ibsenism”—will go down into history beside
Robert Schumann’s early reviews of the compositions of Chopin and
Huxley’s opening broadsides for Darwin. Each paved the way for
better knowledge and better understanding. In 1888, when “The
Perfect Wagnerite” was published, the composer of “The Ring of the
Nibelung” was still caviare to the Britons. The professors of the day
knew him and feared that the great gaping public would come to
know him, and so, like the ancient monks who kept the Scriptures
under lock and key, they greatly desired that he be ignored. Shaw
undertook the vain task of proving the younger Siegfried a socialist—
and succeeded in making his readers meditate upon Wagner. Thus
he earned whatever money and fame he got from his pains.
“The Quintessence of Ibsenism” includes some wonderfully
illuminative and searching passages, but on the whole it is rather out
of date. Shaw makes the Norwegian a social-philosopher of most
earnest purposes, and hangs upon the book an elaborate and
ingenious theory of sham-smashing. As a matter of fact, we have
Ibsen’s own word for it that few of his plays contain much conscious
preaching, and no doubt many of the alarming doctrines Shaw found
in them were not there before he conjured them up. Nevertheless,
the book remains the best estimate of Ibsen yet written in English.
Incidentally, it gave birth to the tumultuous discussion of the so-
called “symbolic” play which raged over England and America half a
dozen years ago. Nowadays one hears little of “symbolism” and
even the comic papers have ceased to regard Ibsen and his
company as men who write in mysterious cryptograms. But persons
who follow the trend of things dramatic remember the disputations
that once awoke the echoes. You will find the germ of them in
Shaw’s half-forgotten discourses upon “Brand,” “Peer Gynt,” and
“Emperor and Galilean.”
In the early ’90’s, when Max Nordau’s mighty tome,
“Degeneration,” was making a stir like a new best-selling novel,
Shaw published a counter-blast to it. Even exceeding Nordau in the
minuteness of his knowledge, he made an answer that, in the words
of one admirer, “wiped Nordau off the field of discussion.” Unhappily,
this effort at regeneration has been forgotten with “Degeneration.”
Shaw’s remarkable essay “On Going to Church,” which was
recently republished in book form, is an earnest plea for less
humbug in public worship. The average church, he argues, is so
hopelessly ugly, tawdry, and irritating, that it straightway dissipates
any religious emotion the stray comer may harbor when he enters.
The socialistic and political essays, while by no means
unimportant to the students of the Shaw plays, are scarcely within
the province of this book.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND STATISTICAL
I
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin, July 26, 1856. His
paternal grandfather, Bernard Shaw, was high sheriff of County
Kilkenny, and his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnall Gurley, a
county ’squire and fox hunter, with an extensive, but entailed estate.
Shaw’s father was a younger son and, in consequence, no
millionaire. But that he was a pauper or that the dramatist, in his
youth, was attracted to vegetarianism because, as James Huneker
hints, cabbages are cheaper than venison, there is no reason to
believe. When the family came to London, in 1876, it took up
quarters in “a well furnished house in a pleasant part” of the city. This
upon the authority of Mr. Stanley Shaw, a relative, in a letter to the
New York Sun, dated Berlin, April 25, 1905.
The Shaws then, were country gentlemen, and in all probability
little different from the other Irish gentry about them. The son of the
younger son was educated and reared in the orthodox fashion. He
learned the speech of the Irish aristocracy and the foreign tongues in
favor—English, French, and maybe a bit of German; he mastered
the three R’s, he studied the history of his country, and went to
church. “When I was a little boy,” he says in his essay “On Going to
Church,” “I was compelled to go on Sunday; and though I escaped
from that intolerable bondage before I was ten, it prejudiced me so
violently against church-going that twenty years elapsed before, in
foreign lands and in pursuit of works of art, I became once more a
church-goer. To this day, my flesh creeps when I recall that genteel
suburban Irish Protestant church, built by Roman Catholic workmen
who would have considered themselves damned had they crossed
its threshold afterward....” A virtuous, commonplace family. Its
present head, says the Mr. Stanley Shaw aforesaid, “is Major Sir
Frederick Shaw, Bart., D. S. O. of Bushey Park, Dublin.” A
respectable, well-sounding name and address.
II
Shaw was twenty when he reached London—the meditative,
impressionable, speculative, iconoclastic age. Apparently he fell an
easy prey to the philosophical anarchists who then held the centre of
the stage—Proudhon, Lassalle, Marx, Louis Blanc, Engels,
Liebknecht, and the lesser Germans. Certainly it was a day of
stimulating stirring about. Huxley and Spencer were up to their necks
in gore; Ibsen, with “The League of Youth” behind him, was giving
form to “The Pillars of Society” and “A Doll’s House”; Nietzsche was
tramping up and down his garden path; Wagner was hard at work;
“The Principles of Sociology” had just come from the press. Sham-
smashing was in the air. Everything respectable was under
suspicion.
It didn’t take Shaw long to spring out of the audience upon the
stage. His first novel, in truth, must have been begun long before he
learned to find his way about the streets of London. Whether it was
good or bad the human race will never know; publishers declined it
without thanks, and the author, when his manuscripts began to have
a value, decided that it should remain unpublished. “It was a very
remarkable work,” he says, “but hardly one which I should be well
advised in letting loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as
a literary workman. I can recall a certain difficulty, experienced even
while I was writing the book, in remembering what it was about....”
Thus heavily did his theme bear down upon him.
What the young Irishman did to relieve his imagination during the
next three years is not recorded. That he learned a great deal,
particularly of music and literature, is very probable. His sister was a
professional singer, and the persons he met were chiefly of the
literary-artistic sort. He was “but an infant of twenty-four, when, being
at that time one of the unemployed” he essayed to mend his
“straitened fortunes” by writing his second novel, “The Irrational
Knot.” It was no masterpiece, but if the few persons who glanced
through it possessed prophetic eyes they must have seen in it marks
of a genius rather startling. A year later came “Love Among the
Artists”—a volume of nearly 500 pages. Then, in order, came
“Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “An Unsocial Socialist.” Not one of
these extraordinary tales struck the fancy of the publishers. “An
encouraging compliment or two,” says Shaw, was his sole reward for
the fatiguing labor of writing them. Not until a good while afterward
did any of the five see the light, and then it was only “to fill up the
gaps in socialist magazines financed by generous friends.” “An
Unsocial Socialist” was the first to reach the dignity of covers. After it
came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “The Irrational Knot.” “Love
Among the Artists” was the last to appear upon the book stalls.
III
Meanwhile Shaw had become engaged in half a dozen reform
crusades. Vegetarianism found in him an early advocate and
socialism won him easily. In 1883, the year Karl Marx died, Thomas
Davidson, an American, laid the foundation of the Fabian Society at
a series of parlor conferences in London. In 1884 Shaw joined the
society, and four years later, when it began holding public meetings,
he found himself one of its leading lights. He has told us himself how
he delighted to indulge in eloquent socialistic orations from cart-tails
and how he came to acquire a bodyguard of faithful auditors whose
presence was assured whenever it was announced that he would
speak. With the pen, too, he labored for the manifesto of 1845, and
even to-day he is still hard at it—despite prosperity, the approach of
middle age and a fair imitation of the thing called fame. He wrote
tracts in great number and after 1889 edited the Fabian Essays.
Incidentally he wrote “Fabianism and the Empire” (1900), “Fabianism
and the Fiscal Question” (1904), and other socialistic broadsides. At
odd moments he had his say, too, upon the subjects of
vegetarianism, the use of quotation marks, capitalization, evening
clothes, capital punishment, and the eternal snobbishness of the
patriotic Britisher.
During all this time he was drawn nearer and nearer to the
theater. As far back as 1885 he began a play in collaboration with
William Archer, the translator of Ibsen. This drama, rewritten and
amplified seven years later, was the first of his works to be
performed in public. But the need of getting on in the world pressed
gloomily. “The question was,” Shaw has told us, “how to get a pound
a week.” Novel writing was plainly hopeless and play making
seemed equally impossible. There remained a chance to set up shop
as a critic. Shaw made the plunge and almost immediately his humor
and originality won him an audience. “Soon,” he says, “my privileges
were enormous and my wealth immense.... The classes patiently
read my essays; the masses patiently listened to my harangues. I
enjoyed the immunities of impecuniosity with the opportunities of a
millionaire....”
At the start Shaw’s regular topic was the art pictorial, but before
long he began to dabble in music. According to Max Beerbohm, his
first essay was printed in the first number of the Star in 1888. This
was a highly purposeful periodical, founded by T. P. O’Connor (“If we
enable the charwoman to put two lumps of sugar in her tea instead
of one,” said “Tay Pay,” in his salutatory, “we shall not have worked in
vain”), and Shaw wrote over the nom de plume of “Corno di
Bassetto.” In 1890, after two years’ service, he transferred his flag to
the World. Then, like his friend Huneker, he abandoned music for the
drama, and from January, 1895, to May, 1898, he was the critic of
the Saturday Review—the London weekly in whose columns the
ingenious Mr. Beerbohm now holds forth.
IV
As has been noted, “Widowers’ Houses,” Shaw’s first play, was
completed in 1892. It was given its initial performance during that
year at the Royalty Theater, London, by the Independent Theater
Company, and made a rather strenuous success. “The socialists and
independents,” says Shaw, “applauded me furiously on principle; the
ordinary play-going first-nighters hooted me frantically on the same
ground; I, being at that time in some practice as what might be
unpolitely called a mob-orator, made a speech before the curtain; the
newspapers discussed the play for a whole fortnight, not only in the
ordinary theatrical notices and criticisms, but in leading articles and
letters; and finally the text of the play was published, with an
introduction by Mr. Grein (the manager of the Independent
Company), an amusing account by Mr. Archer of the original
collaboration, and a long preface and several elaborate controversial
appendices in the author’s most energetically egotistical fighting
style.”
“The Philanderer” was written in 1893, also for the Independent
Theater, and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” was completed the same
year. The former was withdrawn because it was found well-nigh
impossible to unearth actors capable of understanding it sufficiently
to play it, and the latter remained in the manager’s desk because the
virtuous English play-censor forbade its performance. Nine years
later—January 12, 1902—it was presented privately by the Stage
Society.
In 1894 a group of philanthropic play-goers, convinced that the
dramas of the day were intolerable, financed a series of special
performances at the Avenue Theater, London. The second play
presented was Shaw’s “Arms and the Man.” It was given its premiere
April 21, and ran until July 7. Shaw, in his preface to the second
volume of “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant” enters upon an
elaborate account of its receipts and the philosophy thereof. During
its brief season the Londoners paid $8,500 to see it and the cost of
presenting it, counting salaries, rents, lights, advertising, and
royalties, was nearly $25,000. Soon afterwards Richard Mansfield
presented the play in the United States and it made a very fair
success. It is in the Mansfield repertoire even to-day, and now and
then there is a matinée performance of it. But apparently the public
does not very vigorously demand it. In translation it has been done in
Germany.
“The Man of Destiny” was written in 1895. Two years later it was
given one performance at Croydon, England. Then it slumbered until
the last months of 1904, when Arnold Daly played it in New York as
an after-piece to “Candida.” Since then his company has appeared in
it in most of the large cities of the United States. “Candida” and “You
Never Can Tell” were written in 1896. The former was first played by
the Independent Theater Company, during a tour of the English
provinces, in 1897. Arnold Daly, scraping together $300, presented
it, in association with Winchell Smith, at the Berkeley Lyceum, a
diminutive theater in West 45th street, New York, in 1904. The
success of the drama was so great that before long Daly found
himself a Broadway star under the management of Liebler & Co.,
and at present it seems likely that Shaw’s plays will serve to keep
him in the public eye for a good while to come.
Shaw wrote a one-act piece, “How He Lied to Her Husband,” for
his young American interpreter, and when it was presented in New
York, in the fall of 1904, it made a great stir. “You Never Can Tell,”
which had been withdrawn by Shaw after being placed in rehearsal
in London, was given at the Garrick Theater by Daly at the
conclusion of the run of “Candida.” The two volumes of “Plays
Pleasant and Unpleasant” were published in 1898. They included
“Widowers’ Houses,” “The Philanderer,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,”
“Arms and the Man,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Candida,” and “The Man
of Destiny”—not to speak of a 37-page preface dealing with a vast
multitude of subjects.
V
“The Devil’s Disciple,” the first of the “Three Plays for Puritans,”
was written early in 1897. Richard Mansfield presented it in New
York in the fall of that year and it made an excellent success. Like
“Arms and the Man” it is still in his repertoire—pretty far down in the
trunk, it may be mentioned in passing, with many other plays atop of
it. In October, 1899, Murray Carson’s company played it for a few
weeks at Kensington, near London. “Cæsar and Cleopatra” was
written in 1898, and “Capt. Brassbound’s Conversion” the next year.
The “Three Plays for Puritans” were published in 1900. “The
Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Rewarded” was given by the
Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre in 1903. Shaw evolved it from
the fragments of “Cashel Byron’s Profession” to protect his rights in
the latter, an unauthorized dramatization having been made for an
American pugilist-actor. The play was printed as an appendix to the
second English edition of “Cashel Byron’s Profession.”
“Man and Superman” was written in 1902, and published the
next year, with a gigantic preface, and “The Revolutionist’s
Handbook and Pocket Companion” as an appendix. Preface, play,
and appendix make a volume of 244 closely-printed pages. The
drama saw the light on the evening of May 23, 1905, at the Court
Theater, London. Granville Barker, made up to resemble Shaw,
played the role of John Tanner, and Miss Lillian McCarthy was the
Ann Whitefield. May 21 and 22 there were special performances of
the play by the Stage Society, and in September, 1905, Robert
Loraine and his company presented it in New York. The third act with
the scene of Don Juan in Hell was omitted. “John Bull’s Other Island”
was completed in 1904, and presented at six special matinees at the
Court Theater by the Stage Society in the fall of that year. “Major
Barbara” was written in 1905.
Shaw’s two critical tracts, “The Perfect Wagnerite” and “The
Quintessence of Ibsenism” were published in 1888 and 1891,
respectively. His last scholastic manifesto, “The Common Sense of
Municipal Training” was issued in 1904. A remarkable essay, “On
Going to Church,” which appeared originally in the Savoy Quarterly
—Arthur Symons’ journal—in 1896, was reprinted early in 1905, and
attained a large sale. In the late ’80’s, in an English periodical, there
appeared his celebrated answer to Max Nordau’s book,
“Degeneration.” In the opinion of some of his admirers this is, by far,
the best of his controversial works, but, unfortunately, it has not been
reprinted in permanent form.
“When Arnold Daly visited Shaw,” says Gustav Kobbé, “he found
several indications that cynicism and Fabian socialism are not
unprofitable. Shaw lives in large apartments in the New Reform
Club, overlooking the Thames embankment, and he has a country
place at Welwin, too.... There is no sham in the interior of his places
of abode. There is a complete absence of the cheap æsthetic or of
superfluous ornamentation. Simplicity of outline distinguishes such
ornaments as there are. Handles, incrustations and the like are
eschewed. Shaw explained to Daly that he wished nothing in his
abode that would collect dust. Even rugs are tabooed.... Daly did not
find the author a poseur, but simply a man who was not an ordinary
man....”
That Shaw has a keen eye to business a great many aspiring
managers have discovered. He demands a royalty of 15 per cent. of
the gross receipts of his plays—considerably more than all but the
most famous dramatists receive—and is careful and unsentimental
in his negotiations. That he is now basking in the sun of prosperity is
very probable. Saving only Shakespeare, no English author was
better represented in the productions of the winter of 1904–5. In
addition Shaw is much in demand as a lecturer and has no difficulty
in finding a publisher for whatever he chooses to write. In 1898 he
inherited the entailed estate of his maternal grandfather, Walter
Bagnall Gurley. He was married the same year to Miss Charlotte
Frances Payne-Townshend.
“Who’s Who” says that Shaw’s favorite exercises are swimming
and cycling and that his recreation is “anything except sport.” He is
tall, lanky, and wears a shaggy, red beard. He affects loose fitting
flannel shirts and heaps his curses upon the dress suit. He is a
vegetarian, a socialist, and many other things of a heterodox,
fearsome sort. He uses the typewriter in preference to a pen, even
for correspondence. He has travelled in Europe and the Levant, and
may soon come to America. He refuses to use apostrophes in such
words as don’t and can’t, and affects thin spacing, after the German
style, instead of italics, to emphasize words. “Last season,” says the
sapient Mr. Daly, “he was a social freak; now he is a legitimate
amuser (sic!) of the people.”
And so much for George Bernard Shaw.
SHAKESPEARE AND SHAW
SHAW’S notion that Shakespeare’s plays—or, at least, some of
them—have been left behind by the evolution of popular philosophy
and ideals is scarcely original with him. As he himself points out, the
Bard of Avon has been burned in hot critical fire for many years,
despite the “Shakespeare fanciers” who hold him as a god. Some of
his plays, says Shaw, were so far ahead of their time when they
were first presented that it has taken 300 years of theater-goers to
tire of the “long line of disgraceful farces, melodramas, and stage-
pageants which actor-managers, from Garrick and Cibber to our own
contemporaries, have hacked out of them,” and to understand
performances of the texts as the poet wrote them. By the same
token, those plays which Shakespeare himself “wrote down” to the
level of his audience have grown archaic in sentiment and character.
Dramas like “Anthony and Cleopatra,” says Shaw, will nevermore be
written, “nor relished by men in whose philosophy guilt and
innocence, and, consequently, revenge and idolatry, have no
meaning. Such men must rewrite all the old plays in terms of their
own philosophy....”
When this was published, as a preface to “Cæsar and
Cleopatra,” in “Three Plays for Puritans,” there was a volcanic critical
eruption, and ever since then the flames have roared about the
ingenious Irishman. He has delivered lectures explaining his
position, he has set forth his views, elaborately and carefully, in print,
and his admirers have gone to his rescue—but a large party of
Shakespeare worshipers insist on clinging to the belief that he has
attempted to drag the bard from his pedestal and himself climb upon
it. Recently, in London, he delivered a lecture designed to make
clear his idea. Next morning the London morning papers printed
amazingly confused reports of it, and to set himself right Shaw wrote
a letter to the Daily News containing 12 assertions, which, like the 95
theses Luther nailed upon the church door at Wittenberg, he desired
should make known the substance of his argument. Here they are:
“1. That the idolatry of Shakespeare which prevails now existed
in his own time, and got on the nerve of Ben Jonson.
“2. That Shakespeare was not an illiterate poaching laborer who
came up to London to be a horseboy, but a gentleman with all the
social pretensions of our higher bourgeoisie.
“3. That Shakespeare, when he became an actor, was not a
rogue and a vagabond, but a member and part proprietor of a
regular company, using, by permission, a nobleman’s name as its
patron, and holding itself as exclusively above the casual
barnstormer as a Harley Street consultant holds himself above a
man with a sarsaparilla stall.
“4. That Shakespeare’s aim in business was to make money
enough to acquire land in Stratford, and to retire as a country
gentleman with a coat of arms and a good standing in the county;
and that this was not the ambition of a parvenu, but the natural
course for a member of the highly respectable, though temporarily
impecunious, family of the Shakespeares.
“5. That Shakespeare found that the only thing that paid in the
theater was romantic nonsense, and that when he was forced by this
to produce one of the most effective samples of romantic nonsense
in existence—a feat which he performed easily and well—he publicly
disclaimed any responsibility for its pleasant and cheap falsehood by
borrowing the story and throwing it in the face of the public with the
phrase ‘As You Like It.’
“6. That when Shakespeare used that phrase he meant exactly
what he said, and that the phrase ‘What You Will,’ which he applied
to ‘Twelfth Night,’ meaning ‘Call it what you please,’ is not, in
Shakespearean or any other English, the equivalent of the perfectly
unambiguous and penetratingly simple phrase ‘As You Like It.’
“7. That Shakespeare tried to make the public accept real
studies of life and character in—for instance—‘Measure for Measure’
and ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’; and that the public would not have
them, and remains of the same mind still, preferring a fantastic sugar
doll, like Rosalind, to such serious and dignified studies of women as
Isabella and Helena.
“8. That the people who spoil paper and waste ink by describing
Rosalind as a perfect type of womanhood are the descendants of the
same blockheads whom Shakespeare, with the coat of arms and the
lands in Warwickshire in view, had to please when he wrote plays as
they liked them.
“9. Not, as has been erroneously stated, that I could write a
better play than ‘As You Like It,’ but that I actually have written much
better ones, and in fact, never wrote anything, and never intend to
write anything, half so bad in matter. (In manner and art nobody can
write better than Shakespeare, because, carelessness apart, he did
the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.)
“10. That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of
words, blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions
which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words,
colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and even obscurely technical, to
indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant
people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the
easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and that this is
why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on
the head of England since Shakespeare’s time in this form by people
who could not have written ‘Box and Cox’ to save their lives. Also
(this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself more
swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan quality plus the
Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it as expressed in the lines
of Ancient Pistol. What is more, that I have done it, published it, and
had it performed on the stage with huge applause.
“11. That Shakespeare’s power lies in his enormous command of
word music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly
repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes.
“12. That Shakespeare’s weakness lies in his complete
deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry
embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on
communities, which is sociology. That his characters have no
religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any
sort. That there are, as Ruskin pointed out, no heroes in
Shakespeare. That his test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic
test and that since life cannot be justified by this or any other
external test, Shakespeare comes out of his reflective period a
vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is
not worth living, and only surpassing Thackeray in respect to being
fertile enough, instead of repeating ‘Vanitas vanitatum’ at second
hand to work the futile doctrine differently and better in such
passages as ‘Out, out, brief candle.’”
These twelve articles merely serve to arouse a new storm of
discussion and Shaw profited much thereby in the advertising it gave
him. In May, 1905, the controversy had reached such a height that
J. B. Fagan, a young English dramatist, wrote a burlesque about it.
The piece was called “Shakespeare vs. Shaw” and was presented at
the Haymarket Theater, London. The scene of the one act was a
courtroom, in which the case between the two playwrights was being
tried. James Welsh, Miss Winifred Emery, Cyril Maude, and other
prominent players were in the cast and the little revue evidently
made a fair success. At all events, its presentation was a rather
significant thing. Few dramatists, in their lifetimes, see plays written
about them.
THE END

Ebook The Radical Philosophy of Rights 1St Edition Costas Douzinas Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ebook The Radical Philosophy of Rights 1St Edition Costas Douzinas Online PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Radical Philosophy of Rights 1st

Edition Costas Douzinas

Understanding Process Dynamics and Control 1st Edition

Dignity and Human Rights Language Philosophy and Social

The Philosophy of Philosophy 2nd Edition Timothy

The Effectiveness of the UN Human Rights System Reform

Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism 1st Edition

Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John

Managing Change Creativity and Innovation 4th Edition

Managing Change Creativity and Innovation 3rd Edition

Introduction: life between university and parliamentvii

Prologue: are women and animals persons? 3

6 The paradoxes of human rights 89

10 Philosophy and resistance 153

11 The ‘right to the event’: the legality and morality of

Law, persons, rights

The ‘Earnest Englishwoman’ was complaining about the status and

In or about 1929, women were admitted to the status of personhood. What

‘Legal personhood’ is not necessarily synonymous with being human …

Steven Wise of the NhRP commented:

Petitioner argues that the ability to acknowledge a legal duty or legal

1 W.M. Thorburn, ‘What is a Person?’ (1917) 26(103) Mind 291, 307.

8 Arendt, op.cit., 107.

From legal to moral person

13 Mauss, op.cit., 18.

15 As cited in ibid., 20.

21 Anna Grear, Redirecting Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) 66.

23 Steven Collins, ‘Categories, Concepts of Predicaments? Remarks on Mauss’s Use of Philo-

In June 2012, I participated in an invitation-only Oxford conference on dig-

1 Christopher McCrudden (ed.), Understanding Human Dignity (OUP 2014).

Dignitates demanded self-discipline, generosity, a sense of duty and a certain

10 Quoted in ibid., 59.

Scepticism and relativism followed the demotion by some and elevation

[E]verything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be

14 Meir Dan-Cohen, ‘Introduction: Dignity and its (Dis)content’ in Waldron op.cit., 4.

spawns outright contradictions at every turn. We read that slavery and

24 Nietzsche, ‘The Greek State’ quoted in Rosen op.cit., 43.

The person: natural or artificial?

You might also like

Introduction: life between university and parliamentvii

Prologue: are women and animals persons? 3

6 The paradoxes of human rights 89

10 Philosophy and resistance 153