Epigraph: Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1953), 149.
1. Elie Ngarambe interviewed in Mike DeWitt, dir., Worse Than War (Sherman Oaks, CA: JTN Productions, 2009), aired October 18, 2009, on PBS. Worse Than War can be viewed online at Loriann Clod, “Genocide Worse Than War Full Length Documentary Pbs,” YouTube video, 1:54:16, May 24, 2015, https://
2. One might query this interpretation of “same flesh” as indicating “same kind of being.” See, for example, the discussion in Peter Swirski, From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Computer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution (Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 92–93. I have assumed—I believe plausibly—that Ngarambe used the term in much the same way as it was used in premodern Europe to indicate affinity. See David Warren Sabean, “Descent and Alliance: Cultural Meanings of Blood in the Baroque,” in Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, ed. Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher (London: Berghahn, 2013), 144–174.
1. I capitalize “Black” and “White” to indicate that I am using them as racial categories and use the lower case when I am talking about color categories.
2. Several accounts give a figure of 10,000 onlookers. According to the description published in the Dallas News, there were 15,000. See Henry Vance, Facts in the Case of the Horrible Murder of Little Myrtle Vance and Its Fearful Expiation at Paris, Texas, February 1st, 1893 (Paris, TX: P. L. James, 1893). Ida B. Wells’s informant, the Reverend King, who was present at the lynching, reported that there were 20,000 people present. See Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1894). Smith’s dying agonies were recorded on a primitive gramophone roll for further entertainment, and as late as 1909 White New Yorkers were entertained in movie theaters with photographic displays of Smith’s lynching and the recording of his dying screams. See Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). However, this recording may have been a reenactment. See Gustavus Stadler, “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity,” Social Text 28, no. 102 (2010): 87–105.
3. “Burned at the Stake,” Saint Paul Daily Globe. February 2, 1893.
4. “Burned at the Stake,” 1.
5. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999); Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Civitas, 1998).
6. “Tortured Him at the Stake,” New York Sun, 1, https://
7. Wells hired a Pinkerton detective to investigate the case. He informed her that the claim that the murdered child had been mutilated was false, and she believed that the falsification was for the sake of whipping up enthusiasm for mob violence. See Wells, The Red Record, 19.
8. Cited in Wood, Making Whiteness, 65.
9. Cited in Vance, Facts in the Case, 93.
10. Cited in Vance, Facts in the Case, 97–98.
11. Cited in Vance, Facts in the Case, 100.
12. Cited in Phillip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 78.
13. Junius M. Early, An Eye for an Eye; or, The Fiend and the Fagot: An Unvarnished Account of the Burning of Henry Smith at Paris, Texas, February 1, 1893, and the Reason He Was Tortured (Paris, TX: Marshall’s Printing House, 1893), 36.
14. Atticus G. Haygood, “The Black Shadow in the South,” Forum (October 1893): 167–175.
15. Vance, Facts in the Case, 3.
16. For a powerful, historically rich, and conceptually nuanced study of the social construction of black masculinity and the derogation of Black males, see Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Gender and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).
17. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 4–5 and 14.
18. This was relatively brief. The torture of lynching victims could last as long as twelve hours.
19. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 13.
20. “Negro Tortured and Burned to Death at Stake,” San Francisco Call 85, no. 145 (April 24, 1899).
21. W. E. B. DuBois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1944), 53.
22. It is relevant that the English term “maroon,” which was by slaveholders to denote escaped slaves, was derived from the Spanish cimarrón meaning “wild”—a term that was used for cattle that had escaped and gone feral.
23. Cited in Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 284.
24. William Cowart, letter to the editor, The Crisis 2, no. 1 (May 1911): 32.
25. Cited in Vance, Facts in the Case, 98–99. Notice the use of the word “infested,” which would normally be used to refer to destructive vermin or insects, and also notice that the word “communities”—which is used only with reference to human beings—seems here to be restricted to Whites.
26. Congressional Record, 57th Congress, 2nd Session (February 19, 1903), 2564.
27. Charles H. Smith, “Have Negroes Too Much Liberty?,” Forum 16 (1893): 181; George T. Winston, “The Relations of the Whites to the Negroes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 17 (1901): 108–109.
28. Phillip Alexander Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 86.
29. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: A. Wessels, 1907), 249.
30. Dixon, Clansman, 234.
31. Paris News, February 14, 1893, cited in Vance, Facts in the Case, 108–109.
32. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).
33. See, for example, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
34. Robin B. Jeshion, “Slurs, Dehumanization, and the Expression of Contempt,” in Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs, ed. David Sosa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 79.
35. Jeshion, “Slurs, Dehumanization, and the Expression of Contempt,” 80.
36. Daniel Bar-Tal, Shared Beliefs in a Society (London: SAGE, 2000), 122.
37. Jeshion, “Slurs, Dehumanization, and the Expression of Contempt,” 77–108.
38. Richard Boyle, The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972).
39. Transcript of Record at 1246–1247, State of Texas v. Kerry Max Cook (1978) (No. 1-177-179); Kerry Max Cook, Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself after Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Did Not Commit (New York: William Morrow, 2008).
40. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 16.
41. The term “objectification” is found the writings by Hegel, Marx, and Sir William Hamilton, among others, during the nineteenth century, but these writers did not seem to use it to denote the act of treating or conceiving of human beings as things.
42. For detailed discussions, see Barbara Herman, “Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?,” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), 53–72; Lina Papadaki, “Sexual Objectification: From Kant to Contemporary Feminism,” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 3 (2007): 330–348.
43. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Alan Wood and Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 127. This, of course, raises disturbing questions not only about the moral status of nonhuman animals, but also about the moral status of infants and the mentally impaired.
44. Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: Pleasure under Patriarchy,” Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989): 327; Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 316.
45. Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Are Women Human?” and Other International Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4.
46. Not all medical objectification is so benign; see Jacques-Philippe Leyens, “Humanity Forever in Medical Dehumanization,” in Humanness and Dehumanization, ed. Paul G. Bain, Jeroen Vaes, and Jacques-Philippe Leyens (New York: Psychology Press, 2013), 167–185.
47. Martha Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 2251. See also Lina Papadaki, “Feminist Perspectives on Objectification,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://
48. Although her conception of dehumanization is quite different from mine, this argument is also used by Mari Mikkola to distinguish objectification from dehumanization. See Mari Mikkola, The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 145.
49. Jeremy Waldron, “Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment: The Words Themselves,” New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers 98 (2008): 37–38.
50. See, for instance, Jean Améry (1980), At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
51. Nicholas Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 3 (2006): 252–264.
52. Andrea Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality,” in Oxford Readings in Feminism: Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla Cornell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19–44.
53. Linda LeMoncheck, Dehumanizing Women: Treating Persons as Sex Objects (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985), 32.
54. LeMoncheck claims that there are actually two forms of dehumanization. She also thinks of dehumanization as the treatment of others as nonpersons.
55. Mikkola, Wrong of Injustice, 145.
56. Nicholas Epley and Adam Waytz, “Mind Perception,” in The Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed., ed. Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey (New York: Wiley, 2009), 498–541. See also Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups,” Psychological Science 17, no. 10 (2006): 847–853; Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Social Neuroscience Evidence for Dehumanized Perception,” European Review of Social Psychology 20, no. 1 (2009): 192–231; Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Dehumanized Perception,” Zeitschrift Für Psychologie 219, no. 3 (2011): 175–181.
57. Adam Waytz and Nicholas Epley, “Social Connection Enables Dehumanization,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 1 (2012): 70. The quoted passage is somewhat confusing as the authors begin with a claim about the failure to attribute mental properties (a cognitive state) but then move on to talk about “treatment,” which usually refers to behavior. I assume that Epley and Waytz are using “treating” broadly to include attitudes.
58. Waytz and Epley, “Social Connection Enables Dehumanization,” 70.
59. Quoted in Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Vintage, 2015), 304.
60. Susan T. Fiske, “Varieties of (De)Humanization: Divided by Competition and Status,” in Objectification and (De)Humanization: 60th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. Sarah J. Gervais (New York: Springer, 2013), 53.
61. Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites,” Journal of the National Academy of the Sciences 113, no. 16 (2016): 4296–4301; Phillip Atiba Goff, Christian Jackson, Carmen Marie Culotta, Brooke Allison, Lewis Di Leone, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526–545; Colin Holbrook, Daniel M. T. Fessler, and Carlos David Navarete, “Looming Large in Others’ Eyes: Racial Stereotypes Illuminate Dual Adaptations for Representing Threat versus Prestige as Physical Size,” Evolution and Human Behavior 37, no. 1 (2016): 67–78.
62. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 223.
63. Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter, “A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 6, no. 3 (2014): 352.
64. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 229.
65. Cited in “Opinion,” The Crisis 3, no. 3 (January 1912): 108.
66. Herbert C. Kelman, “Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers,” Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973): 25–61; Albert Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory of Moral Thought and Action,” in Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development: Theory, Research and Applications, vol. 1, ed. William M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz (Washington, DC: Psychology Press, 1991), 71–129.
1. The Phrygian hat was an emblem of Jewishness in medieval art.
2. Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 136.
3. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 133.
4. David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 69.
5. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 122.
6. Cited in Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 52. From Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, trans. Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013).
7. See, for example, reproductions of propaganda posters in Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (New York: Harper and Row, 1991).
8. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 251.
9. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 251.
10. Moshe Zimmerman, “Two Generations of in the History of German Antisemitism: The Letters of Theodor Fritsch to Wilhelm Marr,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 23 (1978), 95–97.
11. Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1944), 330.
12. Eleonora Sterling, Judenhass: Die Anfänge des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland (1815–1850) (Europäische Verlagsanstalt: Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969).
13. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt, 1973).
14. The proverb is cited in Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 49. Schmitt’s version was a response to the expression from Fichte used to open the Weimar National Assembly: “Gleichheit alles dessen, was Menschenanlitz trägt” (“Everyone with a human face is equal”); Carl Schmitt, “Das gute Recht der deutschen Revolution,” Westdeutscher Beobachter, May 12, 1933, cited in Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 277.
15. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore: Pelican, 1969), 232.
16. Jordan, White over Black, 234.
17. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolutions (New York: Vintage, 1989), 11–12.
18. James, Black Jacobins, 17.
19. Jordan, White over Black, 233.
20. Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 177, 178.
21. See David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
22. Although the definitive history of the dehumanization of Black people has yet to be written, there are some useful sources. I particularly recommend Wulf D. Hund, Charles W. Mills, and Silvia Sebastiani, Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class, and Race (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2016).
23. Cited in Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 47.
24. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), 156.
25. For Sojourner Truth, see New York Tribune, September 5, 1853, 5; Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: An Address before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College (Rochester, NY: Printed by Lee, Mann & Co., Daily American Office, 1854), 6–7. For Black slaves’ perceptions of the dehumanizing attitudes of Whites, see also Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
26. Samuel A. Cartwright, “Unity of the Human Race Disproved by the Hebrew Bible,” De Bow’s Review 29, no. 2 (August 1860): 129–130; Ariel [Buckner H. Payne], The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status? Is He a Progeny of Ham? Is He a Descendent of Adam and Eve? Has He a Soul? Or Is He a Beast in God’s Nomenclature? What Is His Status as Fixed by God in Creation? What Is His Relation to the White Race? (Cincinnati: Publisher for the Proprietor, 1867), 21; Gottlieb C. Hasskarl, “The Missing Link”; or, the Negro’s Ethnological Status. Is He a Descendant of Adam and Eve? Is He the Progeny of Ham? Has He a Soul? What Is His Relation to the White Race? Is He a Subject of the Church, of the State, Which? (Chambersburg, PA: Democratic News, 1898), 9. For a detailed discussion for these and other racist works of the period, see Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors.
27. Curiously, Joel Williamson claimed in The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) that Carroll was a Black man. I have been unable to find any documentation to support this claim.
28. H. Paul Douglass, Christian Reconstruction in the South (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1909); Edward Atkinson, review of The Negro: A Beast, by Charles Carroll, North American Review (1905): 181. The book also prompted the publication of a whole book in response by W. S. Armistead entitled The Negro Is A Man: A Reply to Professor Charles Carroll’s Book “The Negro is a Beast or In the Image of God” (Tifton, GA: Armistead and Vickers, 1908). For “enormously influential,” see Jane Dailey, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” Journal of American History 91 (2004): 119.
29. Josia C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History: Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton and by Additional Contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), 81.
30. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, lxxv.
31. Josiah Nott, “The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races If Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” American Journal of Medical Sciences 6 (1843): 254.
32. For comprehensive discussions of the history of the debate about hybridity and race, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
33. Cited in Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Nazi Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 206.
34. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 182. At the time, “orang-outan” referred to all of the species of great ape, rather than just one as it does today.
35. Josiah C. Nott, Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (Mobile, AL: Dade and Thompson, 1844), 41.
36. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 46.
37. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 15.
38. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 18.
1. Guenter Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 103. The statement that Jews are not to be regarded as human might be interpreted in two ways. It might be an order that the men take a certain stance toward Jews—to regard them as if they are not human, or it might me an order confirming that Jews are not human and therefore ought not to be regarded as human. Given the pervasiveness of the Nazi doctrine of Jewish subhumanity, the latter seems most plausible.
2. Frederick Douglass, “ ‘Men and Brothers’: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on 7 May 1850,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, ed. John Blassingame and Peter P. Hinks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 238.
3. Henry McNeal Turner, “I Claim the Rights of a Man,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert J. Branham (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 477–478.
4. This example is inspired by of one Frank Keil’s transformation experiments involving a coffeemaker that is transformed into a birdfeeder. See Frank C. Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
5. I am assuming that the two coffeemakers make coffee in much the same way. In fact, it is possible for two artifacts to discharge the same function in quite different ways, and this may require differently constructed innards.
6. For one such incident of Germans being misidentified as Jews, see Jewish Telegraphic Agency, JTA Daily News Bulletin, August 18, 1943, http://
7. The quote is from Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pinscher, cited in Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 7. It is important in this connection that Nazi theorists often characterized Jews as a Gegenrasse—an “antirace”—because they were regarded as an impure and uncanny mixture of races. See, for example, Johannes Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). The full significance of this will be made clear in Chapter 12.
8. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
9. For a very detailed discussion, see Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
10. Steven E. Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and Modern Jewish Experience,” in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, ed. Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 26–27.
11. Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard B. Jussen, David W. Sabean, and Simon Teuscher, Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
12. Rachel E. Boaz, In Search of “Aryan Blood”: Serology in Interwar and National Socialist Germany (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 14. We find a similar theme in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” which features a professor who develops monkey-like characteristics on account of injecting himself with a serum extracted from monkeys. See Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Looe, UK: House of Stratus, 2001), 75–108. Recent psychological research shows there is a tendency to think that cross-species organ transplants might have similar effects. See Meredith Meyer, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Susan Gelman, and Sarah M. Stilwell, “Essentialist Beliefs about Body Transplants in the United States and India,” Cognitive Science 37 (2013): 668–617. In this connection, see also Lesley Alexandra Sharp, Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
13. Letter from Townes to Lister, August 1674, cited in Raymond P. Stearnes, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 216.
14. Doug Kiel, “Bleeding Out: Histories and Legacies of Indian Blood,” in The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations, ed. Norbert Hill Jr. and Kathleen Ratteree (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2017), 80–97.
15. Russell Thornton, “Tribal Membership Requirements and the Demography of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Native Americans,” in Changing Numbers, Changing Needs: American Indian Demography and Public Health, ed. Gary D. Sandefur, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Barney Cohen, (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1996), 103–112.
16. For an impressively detailed account of the rise and fall of Nazi seroanthropology, see Boaz, In Search of “Aryan Blood.”
17. The scientific quest for a reliable biological marker of race began with Francis Galton’s invention of fingerprinting. Although subsequently appropriated by criminology, Galton’s project was driven by the hope that a person’s race is inscribed in their fingerprints. Galton was disappointed that he could discover no race-specific fingerprint patterns, but speculations about the possibility persisted well into the twentieth century. See Francis Galton, Finger Prints (London: Macmillan, 1892).
18. Cited in Boaz, In Search of “Aryan Blood,” 185.
19. Johann W. von Goethe, Faust, trans. Anna Swanwick (New York: Dover Press, 2011).
20. According to an unpublished dissertation by Konstantin Seifert, Serelman’s blood was used to help a woman who subsequently died of placenta praevia. Seifert says that Serelman was arrested ten days later because he was a member of the Communist Party, and sent to Sachsenburg. So it may be that his internment was overdetermined (thanks to Wulf Hund for informing me of this). Konstantin Seifert, “Mediziner, ‘Rassenschänder’, Interbrigadist …? Leben und Werk des Hans Serelman (1898–1944)” (PhD diss., Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 2017).
21. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Nazi Order Prohibiting Jewish Blood for Transfusions Causing Death of Many Soldiers,” March 2, 1942, http://
22. This should come as no surprise, given that the Nazis modelled their racial policies on American Jim Crow laws. See Whitman, Hitler’s American Model.
23. Allyson D. Polsky, “Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses,” Journal of Medical Humanities 23, nos. 3–4 (2002): 180.
24. Judy Scales-Trent, “Racial Purity Laws in the United States and Nazi Germany: The Targeting Process,” Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2001): 266.
25. Cited in Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Nazi Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 145.
26. This folk conception of species membership is ultimately inconsistent with Darwinian thought. See Daniel C. Dennett, “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism,” in How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism, ed. David Livingstone Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 9–22.
27. Ehrenreich, Nazi Ancestral Proof.
1. There is a dauntingly large literature on psychological essentialism, but for an especially rich and sophisticated discussion, see Sarah-Jane Leslie, “Essence and Natural Kinds: When Science Meets Preschooler Intuition,” in Oxford Studies in Epistemology, vol. 4, ed. Tamar S. Gendler and John Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 108–165.
2. Douglas Medin and Andrew Ortony, “Psychological Essentialism,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, ed. Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 179–195.
3. Whether psychological essentialism essentially applies to biological kinds remains an open question. However, it is clear that essentialistic thinking is rampant in thinking about biological taxa. See Susan Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
4. Leslie, “Essence and Natural Kinds.”
5. For a good discussion of essentialism in chemistry, see Leslie, “Essence and Natural Kinds.” For an account of why it does not work in biology, see Daniel C. Dennett, “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism,” in How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism, ed. David Livingstone Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 9–22.
6. Paul E. Griffiths, “What Is Innateness?,” in Arguing about Human Nature: Contemporary Debates, ed. Stephen M. Downes and Edouard Machery (New York: Routledge, 2013).
7. See Eliot Sober, “Evolution, Population Thinking and Essentialism,” Philosophy of Science 47, no. 3 (1980): 350–383.
8. Griffiths, “What Is Innateness?”
9. Dan Sperber, “Why Are Perfect Animals, Hybrids, and Monsters Food for Symbolic Thought?,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8, no. 2 (1996): 157.
10. Griffiths, “What Is Innateness?,” 123.
11. Gil Diesendruck and Susan A. Gelman, “Domain Differences in Absolute Judgments of Category Membership: Evidence for an Essentialist Account of Categorization,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 6, no. 2 (1999): 338–339.
12. Aristotle, Politics, 1.5, 1254b20–23. Cited in Malcolm Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy 53, no. 3 (2008): 262.
13. Quasi-brutes because although Aristotle draws analogies between natural slaves and nonhuman animals, he considers natural slaves to be human beings. See Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” 258–259.
14. Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” 262.
15. Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundation of Ethics,” in World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, ed. J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
16. Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
17. Cited in Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 225.
18. William Harper, Memoir on Slavery, Read before the Society for the Advancement of Learning, of South Carolina, at Its Annual Meeting at Columbia, 1837 (Charleston, SC: James Burger, 1838), 37.
19. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s & Indians Advocate, Suing for Their Admission into the Church, or, A Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negro’s and Indians in Our Plantations (London: J.D., 1680), 3; Morgan Godwyn, “A Brief Account of Religion, in the Plantations, with the Causes of the Neglect and Decay Thereof in Those Parts,” in Some Proposals towards Propagating of the Gospel in Our American Plantations, ed. Francis Brokesby (London: G. Sawbridge, 1708), 3.
20. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 124.
21. Ilan Dar Nimrod and Steven J. Heine, “Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA,” Psychological Bulletin 137, no. 5 (2011): 800–818.
22. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995), 40–43. For a readable, brief account of the ideological role of the gene, see Stuart Newman, “The Divisive Gene,” Monthly Review 72, no. 8 (January 2020).
23. See, for example, Deborah A. Bolnick, “Individual Ancestry Inference and the Reification of Race as a Biological Phenomenon,” in Revisiting Race in the Genomic Age, ed. Sarah S. Richardson, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Barbara A. Koenig (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 70–85; Jonathan M. Kaplan and Rasmus G. Winther, “Ontologies and Politics of Bio-Genomic ‘Race,’ ” Theoria 60, no. 3 (2013): 54–80; Jonathan M. Kaplan and Rasmus G. Winther, “Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of ‘Race,’ ” Biological Theory 7, no. 4 (2013): 401–412; Koffi N. Maglo, Tesfaye B. Mersha and Lisa J. Martin, “Population Genomics and the Statistical Values of Race: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Biological Classification of Human Populations and Implications for Clinical Genetic Epidemiological Research,” Frontiers in Genetics 7, no. 22 (2016), https://
24. For one of many examples, see Sopan Deb, “Obama Portraits ‘Push Us to Think More,’ Readers Say,” New York Times, February 18, 2018.
1. See Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
2. Oskar Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” in The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1991), 85–86.
3. Panizza, “Operated Jew,” 52.
4. Panizza, “Operated Jew.”
5. Panizza, “Operated Jew,” 51.
6. Panizza, “Operated Jew,” 72–73.
7. Joela Jacobs, “Assimilated Aliens: Imagining National Identity in Oskar Panizza’s Operated Jew and Salomo Friedlaender’s Operated Goy,” in Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism, ed. Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, and Graeme Stout (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 59–61.
8. Panizza, “Operated Jew,” 74.
9. Jack Zipes, “The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. Dagmar Lorenz, Gabriele Weinberger, and Alan Levenson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 154–164; Kreutzwendedich, which means “cross turn-around,” may refer to the Hackenkreutz (swastika). “Rehsok” is the inversion of “kosher.” See Jacobs, “Assimilated Aliens.”
10. Salomo Friedlaender, “The Operated Goy,” in The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1991), 75.
11. Friedlaender, “Operated Goy,” 76.
12. Friedlaender, “Operated Goy,” 77. Friedlaender does not say that the dog was trained to attack Jews on command. He says that the dog was trained to “bite any Jews who came too close.” When Rebecka Gold-Isaac subsequently approaches the count, the dog, but not its master, is aware that she is a Jew. The idea that the count’s Great Dane could distinguish between Jews and gentiles indicates a subtle intrusion of race realism into Friedlaender’s otherwise skeptical narrative. The “Borkum Hymn” was a song about the beautiful North Sea island resort of Borkum, which emphasized that its beaches were Judenfrei (free of Jews). The final verse states, “Those who come with flat feet, crooked noses, and curly hair must not enjoy the beach, but must be out! Be out! Out!” Singing the “Borkum Hymn” was a regular part of vacationing there. See Tom Blass, The Naked Shore of the North Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 114.
13. Friedlaender, “Operated Goy,” 85–86.
14. Jacobs, “Assimilated Aliens,” 69.
15. Friedlaender, “Operated Goy,” 122.
16. George Schuyler, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933–1940 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 31. Notice that Crookman appears to implicitly assert racial essentialism while explicitly denying it. In saying that Negros come packaged in a broad range of phenotypes, he implies that what it is that makes a person a Negro is something other than their phenotype.
17. Schuyler, Black No More, 130, 131.
18. This phrase may be a reference to the “new Christians” in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain: Jews who converted to Christianity under duress but were nonetheless believed to have tainted Jewish blood.
19. Schuyler, Black No More, 219–221.
20. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge), 191.
21. Robert Wilson Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1907), 135. Republished as America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 2015).
22. This methodological taxonomy is from Julie L. Shulman and Joshua Glasgow, “Is Race-Thinking Biological or Social, and Does It Matter for Racism? An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Social Philosophy 41, no. 3 (2010): 244–259.
23. For a good discussion of these, see Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Teach and Think about Human Difference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See also Joshua Glasgow, Julie L. Shulman, and Enrique Covarrubias, “The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and Its Relation to Racial Attitudes: A New Approach,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 9, nos. 1–2 (2009): 15–38.
24. See Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul, Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volumes 1 and 2: Metaphysics and Epistemology; Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The claim that implicit attitudes are prevalent and often fail to cohere with one’s explicit attitudes is independent of debates surrounding the Implicit Association Test, which is an influential tool for tapping implicit biases. For an interesting discussion of criticisms of this approach, see John Schwenkler, “What Can We Learn from the Implicit Association Test? A Brains Blog Roundtable,” Brains Blog, January 17, 2017, http://
25. Glasgow, Shulman, and Covarrubias, “Ordinary Conception of Race.” See also Shulman and Glasgow, “Is Race-Thinking Biological or Social.”
26. Glasgow, Shulman, and Covarrubias, “Ordinary Conception of Race,” 36.
27. Glasgow, Shulman, and Covarrubias, “Ordinary Conception of Race,” 25.
28. Morning, Nature of Race.
1. Evelin Lindner, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood / Praeger Security International, 2006), 5–7. For the language of uprightness, see also Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).
2. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Oludamini Ogunnaike, “From Heathen to Sub-Human: A Genealogy of the Influence of the Decline of Religion on the Rise of Modern Racism,” Open Theology 2 (2016): 785–803.
3. See Raymond Corbey, The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4. For an excellent discussion of how the Great Chain of Being came to underpin racial hierarchies, see Ogunnaike, “From Heathen to Sub-Human.”
5. Julien-Joseph Virey, “Art nègre,” in Dictionnaire des Sciences Mèdicales, vol. 35 (Paris: Crapart, 1819), 385.
6. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859).
7. Karol Wojtyla, “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays, vol. 4, Catholic Thought from Lublin, ed. Andrew N. Woznicki (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 178; George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 3–4. For a very informative discussion of the role of human supremacism in human rights discourse, see Will Kymlicka “Human Rights without Human Supremacism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 6 (2018): 763–792.
8. Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 30–31. The embedded quote is from Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862).
9. Emanuele Rigato and Alessandro Minelli, “The Great Chain of Being Is Still Here,” Evolution: Education and Outreach 6, article no. 18 (2013), http://
10. Sean Nee, “The Great Chain of Being,” Nature 435 (May 26, 2005): 429. See also Rigato and Minelli, “Great Chain of Being”; J. David Archibald, Aristotle’s Ladder, Darwin’s Tree: The Evolution of Visual Metaphors for Biological Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
11. A. J. Lowe and R. J. Abbott, “Reproductive Isolation of a New Hybrid Species, Senecio Eboracensis Abbott & Lowe (Asteraceae),” Heredity (Edinb) 92, no. 5 (2004): 386–395.
12. Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 55–59. Lovejoy interprets Aristotle’s notion of continuity in terms of metaphysical vagueness: natural kinds are fuzzy rather than discrete, with each kind shading into it is neighbors, such that there might be borderland entities that belong to two natural kinds. However, Herbert Granger has shown that this is probably incorrect, arguing that Aristotle’s essentialism precluded this sort of vagueness. In his view, Aristotle held that natural kinds are sharply bounded, but the boundaries between them may be impossible to discriminate. Herbert Granger, “The Scala Naturae and the Continuity of Kinds,” Phronesis 30, no. 2 (1985): 181–200.
13. T. J. Kasperbauer, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 74; H. Rae Westbury and David L. Neumann, “Empathy-Related Responses to Moving Film Stimuli Depicting Human and Non-Human Animal Targets in Negative Circumstances,” Biological Psychology 78 (2008): 66–74; S. Plous, “Psychological Mechanisms in the Human Use of Animals,” Journal of Social Issues 49, no. 1 (1993), 11–52; Michael W. Allen, Matthew Hunstone, Jon Waerstad, Emma Foy, Thea Hobbins, Britt Wikner, and Joanne Wirrel, “Human-to-Animal Similarity and Participant Mood Influence Punishment Recommendations for Animal Abusers,” Society and Animals 10, no. 3 (2002): 267–284.
14. Catherine Dupré, The Age of Dignity: Human Rights and Constitutionalism in Europe (Sydney: Hart, 2015). See also Lisa Guenther, “Beyond Dehumanization: A Post-Humanist Critique of Solitary Confinement,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10, no. 2 (2012): 47–68.
15. Gen. 1:26–28 (New International Version).
16. Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 349.
17. Francis E. Ekanem, “On the Ontology of African Philosophy,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention 1, no. 1 (2012): 56. See also Francis Etim, “African Metaphysics,” Journal of Asian Scientific Research 3, no. 1 (2013): 11–17; Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1969); John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Nairobi: Heineman, 1969).
18. G. E. R. Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
19. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 294.
20. Eva Hunt, The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacantican Mythical Poem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 89. For Mesoamerican phagiohierachy, see also John D. Monaghan, “Theology and History in the Study of Mesoamerican Religions,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, suppl. 6, Ethnology, ed. John D. Monaghan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 24–49.
1. John Stuart Mill, “On Nature,” in Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1975), 12.
2. Mill had it that nonnaturalness, in this sense, requires modification by voluntary human intervention. If he meant to say by this that these modifications must be deliberate effects, then his criterion seems too restrictive, as anthropogenic climate change seems to be a good candidate for something that is nonnatural. So, I interpret Mill’s criterion as referring to the effects of voluntary intervention, which may be intended or not.
3. See, for example, Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?,” Feminist Studies 1, no. 2 (1972): 5–31; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 7–28; Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978).
4. Stefaan Blancke, Frank Van Breusegem, Geert De Jaeger, Johan Braeckman, and Marc Van Montagu, “Fatal Attraction: The Intuitive Appeal of GMO Opposition,” Trends in Plant Science 20, no. 7 (2015): 414–418.
5. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 6–7. See also Plato’s conception of ideal social stratification, and the “grand lie” to justify it, in The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 107.
6. See, for example, Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012).
7. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 48.
8. Williams did not use “prejudice” here in a pejorative sense. He believed that the mere fact of humanness provides grounds for us—that is, other human beings—to treat others as having special moral status. See Cora Diamond, “Bernard Williams on the Human Prejudice,” Philosophical Investigations 41, no. 4 (2018): 379–398.
9. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics: Writings from the Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 4.
10. Cicero, On Obligations: De Officiis, trans. P. G. Walsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 36–37.
11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, vol. 1, pt. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 471.
12. For an insightful discussion, see Ann Phillips, The Politics of the Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
13. William Graham Summer, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 13.
14. There is a very large literature on in-group / out-group biases. Some helpful contributions are Brad Pinter and Anthony G. Greenwald, “A Comparison of Minimal Group Induction Procedures,” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 14, no. 1 (2011): 81–98; Mark Bennett, Martyn Barrett, Rauf Karakozov, Giorgi Giorgi Kipiani, Evanthia Lyons, Valentyna Pavlenko, and Tatiana Riazanova, “Young Children’s Evaluations of the Ingroup and of Outgroups: A Multi-National Study,” Social Development, 13, no. 1 (2004): 124–141; Henri Tajfel, M. G. Billig, R. P. Bundy, and Claude Flament, “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology 1, no. 2 (1971): 149–178. For the Humean roots, see David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). For chimpanzee aggression, see Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997).
15. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity (New York: Random House, 2020), xxiv.
16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982), 186.
17. Hobbes, Leviathan, 127.
18. For an interesting discussion that is quite relevant to this point, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schmitt understands the political as the sphere of collective friends and enemies. On this account, the political is uniquely human, and reflects the special significance that human beings accord to one another (although it does not exhaust that significance).
19. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Oliver S. Curry, “Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centered Approach,” in The Evolution of Morality, ed. Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (New York: Springer, 2016), 27–52.
20. For justification of this claim, see the research summarized in T. J. Kasperbauer, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
21. Ayal Halfon and Ran Barkai, “The Material and Mental Effects of Animal Disappearance on Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers, Past and Present,” Time and Mind 13, no. 1 (2020): 1–29; Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, Hunters, Predators, and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Animals (New York: Berghahn, 2015); Ann Fienup-Riordan, Eskimo Essays: Yup’ik Lives and How We See Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Edouardo Vivieros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–488.
22. Harvey A. Feit, “Hunting, Nature, and Metaphor: Political and Discursive Strategies in James Bay Cree Resistance and Autonomy,” Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, ed. John A. Grim (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 421. Feit notes that the hierarchical conception of nature is not altogether absent in Cree metaphysics, but the division between kinds is neither rigid nor absolute. See also Robert A. Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
23. Helga Vierich, “Why They Matter: Hunter-Gatherers Today,” Medium, August 27, 2017, https://
24. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
1. For a range of views, see, for example, Richard E. Leakey and Robert Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Anchor, 1993); Christophe Falguères, Jean-Jacques Bahain, Yuji Yokoyama, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, Eudald Carbonell, James L. Bischoff, and Jean-Michel Dolo, “The Earliest Humans in Europe: The Age of TD6 Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, Spain,” Journal of Human Evolution, 37, nos. 3–4 (September 1999): 343–352; Daniel Schmitt, “Insights into the Evolution of Human Bipedalism from Experimental Studies of Humans and Other Primates,” Journal of Experimental Biology 206 (2003): 1437–1448; Richard Potts, “Early Human Predation,” in Predator-Prey Interactions in the Fossil Record, ed. Patricia H. Kelley, Michael Kowalewski, and Thor A. Hansen (New York: Springer, 2003), 359–376; Tarjei S. Mikkelsen, “What Makes Us Human?,” Genome Biology 5, no. 238 (2004), https://
2. Ian Tattersall, “The Genus Homo,” Inference: International Review of Science 2, no. 1 (February 2016), http://
3. Douglas Medin, “Concepts and Conceptual Structure,” American Psychologist 44, no. 12 (1989): 1469–1481; Ernst Mayr, “A Tenderfoot Explorer in New Guinea: Reminiscences of an Expedition for Birds in the Primeval Forests of the Arfak Mountains,” Natural History 32 (1932): 83–97; Ralph Bulmer, “Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxonomy among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands,” Man 2, no. 1 (1967): 5–25. For the question of whether whales are fish, see John Dupré, “Are Whales Fish?,” in Folkbiology, ed. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 461–476.
4. For an introduction to contemporary philosophical work on human nature, see Elisabeth Hannon and Tim Lewins, Why We Disagree about Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For relevant transhumanist work, see David John Roden, “The Disconnection Thesis,” in Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, ed. Amnon H. Eden, James H. Moor, Johnny H. Seraker, and Eric Steinhart (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 281–298. My historical sketch of the concept of personhood is obviously parochial, as it focuses exclusively on the Christian West. For as somewhat broader view, at least of the concept of personhood, see Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
5. Jack Turner, “John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 2 (2011): 267–297; Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
6. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 66.
7. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter A. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 335; Charles C. Taylor, “The Person,” in Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes, Category of the Person, 257–281; Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, “Apes, Persons, and Bioethics,” in All Apes Great and Small, vol. 1., African Apes, ed. Biruté M. F. Galdikas, Nancy Erickson Briggs, Lori K. Sheeran, Gary L. Shapiro, and Jane Goodall (New York: Springer, 2001), 283–291; Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, “The Great Ape Project,” in Peter Singer: Unsanctifying Human Life, ed. Helge Kuhse (Oxford: Blackwell), 135.
8. Charles C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 6–7.
9. In fact, philosophers who ostensibly support the human / person distinction often slip into using the two terms interchangeably. Judith Jarvis Thomson states, in a celebrated paper on the ethics of abortion, “Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception.” Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 69. Sometimes, instead of “humanness” and “personhood,” the contrast is between descriptive and evaluative notions of the human, but this boils down to the very same dichotomy. See, for example, Eric Juengst and Daniel Moseley, “Human Enhancement,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://
10. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Pimlico, 1995), 238–239.
11. Nick Haslam, Stephen Loughnan, Kashima Yoshihisa, and Paul Bain, “Attributing and Denying Humanness to Others,” European Review of Social Psychology 19, no. 1: 55–85.
12. Nick Haslam, Paul Bain, Lauren Douge, Max Lee, and Brock Bastian, “More Human Than You: Attributing Humanness to Self and Others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, no. 6 (2005): 940.
13. Haslam et al., “More Human Than You.” For a very sharp methodological critique of Haslam’s approach, see Florence E. Enock, Jonathan C. Flavell, Steven P. Tipper, and Harriet Over, “No Convincing Evidence Outgroups Are Denied Uniquely Human Characteristics: Distinguishing Intergroup Preference from Trait-Based Dehumanization,” Cognition 212 (July 2021): https://
14. Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, “How Biological Is Essentialism?”; Medin and Atran, Folkbiology.
15. Haslam et al., “More Human Than You,” 941.
16. Nick Haslam, “Genetic Essentialism, Neuroessentialism, and Stigma: Commentary on Dar-Nimrod and Heine,” Psychological Bulletin 137, no. 5 (2011): 819–824.
17. Ann Phillips, The Politics of the Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2015.
18. Phillips, The Politics of the Human, 9.
19. Michael Hauskeller, “Making Sense of What We Are: A Mythological Approach to Human Nature,” Philosophy 84, no. 372 (2009): 97–98.
20. Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History (New York: UNESCO, 1952), 12.
21. George Rippey Stewart, Names on the Globe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 68.
22. For similar views, see Maria E. Kronfeldner, What Is Left of Human Nature: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Voices of the African Diaspora 8, no. 2 (1992): 13; Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Gender and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); Kay Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2007); Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und socialen Sprache (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 2006); Marshall Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008).
23. This is even true of paleoanthropological disputes about what primate taxa count as human. See Raymond Corbey, The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
1. Charles W. Mills and Danny Goldstick, “A New Old Meaning of ‘Ideology,’ ” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Revue 28, no. 3 (1989): 417.
2. John Gerring, “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis,” Political Research Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1997): 957–959.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 5, Marx and Engels 1845–47, ed. Jack Cohen et al., trans. Clemens Dutt, W. Lough, and C. P. Magill (London: Lawrence Wishart, 2010).
4. Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 425.
5. As Joe McCarney points out, this phrase may have been intended to refer specifically to Hegelianism, as the book primarily targets the young Hegelians, rather than to ideology as such. He interprets “in die ganzen Ideologie” as “in the whole ideology” instead of “in all ideology.” Joe McCarney, The Real World of Ideology (London: Harvester, 1980).
6. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 59.
7. Tommie Shelby, “Race, Moralism, and Social Criticism,” Du Bois Revue: Social Science Research on Race 11, no. 1 (2014): 66; Sally Haslanger, “Culture and Critique,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 91, no. 1 (2017): 150. Other functionalists are Alan W. Wood, “Ideology, False Consciousness, and Social Illusion,” in Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 345–363; Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
8. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983), 33.
9. Marion I. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41.
10. The locus classicus for this conception of function is Robert Cummins, “Functional Analysis,” Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 20 (1975): 741–765.
11. Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, ed. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields (New York: Verso, 2012), 111–148.
12. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 2007), 5.
13. There is a parallel with the notorious paradoxes of self-deception. In fact, the theory of ideology that I offer in this chapter is largely inspired by my analysis of self-deception. See David Livingstone Smith, “Form and Function in Self-Deception: A Biological Model,” Sistemi Intelligenti 3 (2013): 565–580; David Livingstone Smith, “Self-Deception: A Teleofunctional Approach,” Philosophia 42, no. 1 (2013): 181–199.
14. See Ruth Garratt Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); Ruth Garratt Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Ruth Garratt Millikan, Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
15. Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.
16. John A. Byers, American Pronghorn: Social Adaptations and the Ghosts of Predators Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv–xvi.
17. Tommie Shelby, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory,” Philosophical Forum 34, no. 2 (2003): 159.
18. Geuss, Idea of a Critical Theory, 12.
19. Wood, “Ideology, False Consciousness, and Social Illusion.”
20. Haslanger, “Culture and Critique,” 150.
21. Shelby, “Race, Moralism, and Social Criticism,” 60.
22. Shelby, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory,” 174.
23. This discussion owes a great deal to David J. Buller, “DeFreuding Evolutionary Psychology,” in Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays, ed. Valerie G. Hardcastle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 99–114.
24. I use “driving forces” rather than “motives” for Triebkräfte. Otherwise this is the Torr translation. Friedrich Engels, “Engels Letter to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Correspondence, 1846–1895, ed. and trans. Donna Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 434–435.
25. John Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
26. Ernst Mayr, “Proximate and Ultimate Causation,” Biology and Philosophy 8 (1993): 95–98.
1. The phrase “teaching of contempt” is from Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: The Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Reinhart, Holt, and Winston, 1964). For early Christian anti-Semitism, see Rosemary Radford Reuther, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).
2. John 8:44–45 (New Revised Standard Version).
3. Moshe Lazar, “The Lamb and the Scapegoat: The Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery,” in Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 45.
4. John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, trans. Paul W. Harkins, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 8.
5. Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
6. Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (London: Head of Zeus, 2013).
7. Peter the Venerable, Letters of Peter the Venerable, vol. 1, ed. Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 328.
8. See Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983).
9. Dana Carleton Munro, “Urban and the Crusaders,” Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 5.
10. Robert Chasan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Jewish Publication Society: Philadelphia, 1996); Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders (Brooklyn, NY: KTAV Publishing House, 1996).
11. Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 48.
12. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 194.
13. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 61–62. Although Heng is explicitly referring to England in this passage, this was the pattern of the treatment of Jews throughout Western and Central Europe.
14. Heng, Invention of Race, 29–30.
15. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), xi–xii.
16. Max-Sebastián Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg, Race and Blood in the Iberian World (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2012).
17. See the discussion in Richard Cole, “Kyn / fólk / Þjóð / Ætt: Proto-Racial Thinking and Its Application to Jews in Old Norse Literature,” in Fear and Loathing in the North: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region, ed. Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams (De Gruyter: Berlin, 2015), 239–268.
18. For example, the philosopher Judah Ha-Levi (c1045–1141) argued that Jews possess a special divine faculty, passed down biologically from one generation to the next, that distinguishes them from gentiles. Raphael Jospe, “Teaching Judah Ha-Levi: Defining and Shattering Myths in Jewish Philosophy,” in Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Raphael Jospe (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997): 112–128.
19. The placeholder conception was introduced in Douglas Medin and Andrew Ortony, “Psychological Essentialism,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, ed. Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 179–195.
20. See the discussion in David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011).
21. Heng, Invention of Race, 30. In addition to the characteristics mentioned in this passage by Heng, Jews were also thought to have tails and “goat beards” (goats were associated in the Medieval mind with the devil). See Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews.
22. Lazar, “Lamb and the Scapegoat,” 52.
23. Steven F. Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggie McKracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 159.
24. Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and Its History (London: Warburg Institute, 1974), 33.
25. Kruger, “Conversion,” 164–165.
26. Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 176.
27. Albert Winkler, “The Medieval Holocaust: The Approach of the Plague and the Destruction of Jews in Germany, 1348–1349,” Federation of East European Family History Societies 13 (2005): 6–24.
28. Jews were associated with plague at the 681 Council of Toledo. In 1320 anti-Semitic violence erupted in France and Aragon in the so-called Shepherd’s Crusade, which set the stage for accusations that Jews (in league with Muslims) had plotted with lepers to poison water supplies. See Malcolm Barber, “Lepers, Jews and Moslems: The Plot to Overthrow Christendom in 1321,” History 66, no. 216 (1981): 1–17.
29. Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in the Apocalyptic Age, 1200–1600 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994).
30. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past and Present 186 (2007): 16–17.
31. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127, no. 3 (2012): 1339–1392.
32. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, 12.
33. Magda Teter, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
34. See “The Canons of the Fourth Lateral Council,” in Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall, last modified January 20, 2021, https://
35. Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, trans. Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013). For images of Jews as demons, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
36. Lazar, “Lamb and the Scapegoat,” 55–56.
37. In addition to the many representations of Jews consuming the blood of murdered Christian children, there are also images of outright cannibalism—for instance, the statue that still stands in the city of Berne depicting a Jewish man greedily devouring a child, which was later exploited in Italian fascist and Nazi propaganda. See David I. Kertzerand and Gunnar Mokosh, “The Medieval in the Modern: Nazi And Italian Fascist Use of the Ritual Murder Charge,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 33, no. 2 (2019): 177–196. See the related discussion in the “Passing Strange” section of Chapter 2.
38. Ruth G. Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
39. Birgit Weidl, “Laughing at the Beast: The Judensau: Anti-Jewish Propaganda and Humor from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 325–364.
40. Shachar, Judensau.
41. Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast,” 345.
42. Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast,” 346.
43. Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, trans. Carol Volk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 101.
44. Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast,” 325.
45. Martina Pluda, Animal Law in the Third Reich (Barcelona: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2019), 82.
46. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam, 1986); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Julius H. Schoeps, Bilder der Judenfeinschaft: Antisemitismus, Vorurteile und Mythen (Augsburg: Bechtermünz, 1999); Oliver Moody, “ ‘Judensau’ Shout in Anti-Semitic Attack,” The Times, September 10, 2018.
47. Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 292.
48. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 319, 296.
49. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1998), 15.
50. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 197.
51. Alfred Rosenberg, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jüdische Weltpolitik, cited in Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 217; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Pimlico, 1994), 294. For Hitler’s demonization of Jews in Mein Kampf, see Felicity Rash, The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (New York: Peter Land, 2006).
52. Joseph Goebbels cited in Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 225.
53. Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Nazi Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 106–107.
54. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher, 107.
55. See Hillel Kieval, “Representation and Knowledge in Medieval and Modern Accounts of Jewish Ritual Murder,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 1 (1994–95): 52–72.
56. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher, 209. The special issue was reprinted in 1976 by the Louisiana-based White supremacist New Christian Crusade Church.
57. See David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
58. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 87.
59. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For a discussion of von Leers, Schmitt, and others in this vein, see Biale, Blood and Belief, chap. 4.
60. Rash, Language of Violence, 130.
61. Louis W. Bondy, Racketeers of Hatred: Julius Streicher and the Jew-Baiters’ International (London: N. Wolsey, 1946), 61.
62. Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) can be viewed on the Australian War Memorial website at https://
63. Voigtländer and Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated.”
64. See also Bernard Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290–1700 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975).
1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 481; Philip S. Kitcher, “Experimental Animals,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 43, no. 4 (2015): 289.
2. T. J. Kasperbauer, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Robert A. Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (London: G. Hurst, 2017); John Knight, “The Anonymity of the Hunt: A Critique of Hunting as Sharing,” Current Anthropology 53 (2012): 334–355. The example of the seal ritual is from Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
3. Harvey, Animism, 145.
4. “Case No. 4:09 CV 05796 CW: Expert Report of Craig Haney, Ph.D., J.D.,” Center for Constitutional Rights, https://
5. David Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 40. See also Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Harvey, Animism.
6. Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 79–80.
7. S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1947), 79.
8. Marshall, Men against Fire, 78.
9. See Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, “The Roots of Human Altruism,” British Journal of Psychology 100, no. 3 (2011): 455–471.
10. David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay, 2009), 86.
11. Harry Holbert Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1949), 225.
12. Iranaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals, and Aggression (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 100.
13. Fiery Cushman, Kurt Gray, Allison Gaffey, and Wendy Berry Mendes, “Simulating Murder: the Aversion to Harmful Action,” Emotion 12, no. 1 (2012), 6.
14. Grossman, On Killing, 31. Marshall also said that military psychiatrists in the European theater during World War II “found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure.” Marshall, Men against Fire, 78.
15. Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic, “Perpetrator Abhorrence: Disgust as a Stop Sign,” Metaphilosophy 45, no. 4 (2014): 270–287. See also Saira Mohamed, “Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity,” Columbia Law Review 115, no. 5 (2015): 1157–1216.
16. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 188.
17. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 67–68.
18. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), 421, 201.
19. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 106.
20. Jason Anthony Riley, “Does YHWH Get His Hands Dirty? Reading Isaiah 63: 1–6 in Light of Depictions of Divine Postbattle Purification,” in Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts, ed. Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames, and Jacob L. Wright (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 243.
21. Num. 31:19–20 (New Revised Standard Version). See also the chapters by Kelle, Niditch, and Riley in Kelle, Ames, and Wright, Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol.
22. Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 153.
23. Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
24. William Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus (London: Macmillan, 1922), 97.
25. David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2015); Bernard J. Verkamp, The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1993), 11.
26. Verkamp, Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors. For medieval Christian views on killing in combat, see also Robert Emmet Meagher, Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
27. Cyril Daryll Forde, Ethnography of the Yuma Indians (Berkeley: University of California, 1931).
28. Leslie Spier, Mohave Culture Items (Museum of North Arizona Bulletin 28) (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona Society for Science and Art, 1955), 28–30.
29. Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana, Massacre on the Gila: An Account of the Last Major Battle between American Indians, with Reflections on the Origin of War (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987).
30. Eileen Jensen Krige, The Social System of the Zulus (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1965), 276–277.
31. H. E. Rawson, The Life of a South African Tribe (Neuchatel: Imprimerie Attinger Freres, 1913).
32. For the use of drugs in combat, see Lukasz Kamienski, Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare (London: Hurst, 2016).
33. W. Goldschmidt, “The Inducement of Military Conflict in Tribal Societies,” in The Social Dynamics of Peace and Conflict: Culture in International Security, ed. Robert A. Rubinstein and Mary Lecron Foster (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 47–65.
34. See Paul Roscoe, “Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (2007): 485–495.
35. The literature is huge. For example, see M. H. Johnson, S. Dziurawiec, H. Ellis, and J. Morton, “Newborns’ Preferential Tracking of Face-Like Stimuli and Its Subsequent Decline,” Cognition 40, no. 1–2 (1991): 1–19; Catherine J. Mondloch, Terry L. Lewis, D. Robert Budreau, Daphne Maurer, James Dannemiller, Benjamin Stephens, and Kathleen Kleiner-Gathercoal, “Face Perception during Early Infancy,” Psychological Science 10, no. 5: (1999): 419–422; H. D. Ellis and S. De Schonen, “The Development of Face Processing Skills” [and Discussion], Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological Sciences 335, no. 1273 (1992): 105–111; Mark H. Johnson, “Subcortical Face Processing,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2005): 766–774; Jennifer J. Richler, Olivia Cheung, and Isabel Gauthier, “Holistic Processing Predicts Face Recognition,” Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2011): 464–471. For unborn babies’ responsiveness to faces, see Vincent M. Reid, Kirsty Dunn, Robert J. Young, Johnson Amu, Tim Donovan, and Nadja Reissland, “The Human Fetus Preferentially Engages with Face-Like Visual Stimuli,” Current Biology 27, no. 12 (2017): 1825–1828; Takahiko Koike, Hiroki C. Tanabe, Shuntaro Okazaki, Eri Nakagawa, Akihiro T. Sasaki, Koji Shimada, Sho K. Sugawara, Hakura K. Takahashi, Kazufumi Yoshihara, Jorge Bosch-Bayard, and Norihito Sadato, “Neural Substrates of Shared Attention as Social Memory: A Hyperscanning Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” Neuroimage 125 (2015): 401–412.
36. For responses to facial disfigurement, see Marjorie Gehrhardt, The Men with Broken Faces: The “Gueules Cassées” of the First World War (New York: Peter Lang, 2015). For the notion of “seeing human” and its neurological basis, see Anthony I. Jack, Abigail Dawson, and Megan E. Norr, “Seeing Human: Distinct and Overlapping Neural Signatures Associated with Two Forms of Dehumanization,” Neuroimage 79 (2013): 313–328. See also Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillipe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985).
37. Grossman, On Killing, 128.
38. Raul Hilberg, The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship (London: Berghahn, 1985), 19.
39. Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 152–153.
40. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 161–162. See also Nestar Russell, Understanding Willing Participants: Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust, vol. 2 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
41. Russell, Understanding Willing Participants, 245.
42. Heinrich Himmler, “Speech of the Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler at Kharkow, April 1943,” in United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1946), 574.
1. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate Suing for Their Admission into the Church (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), 14–15.
2. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indians Advocate, 13–14.
3. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indians Advocate, 30.
4. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indians Advocate, 40.
5. Stanley Cavell, “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 375.
6. Cavell, “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” 375.
7. Cavell “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” 375.
8. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 144.
9. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 143.
10. Manne, Down Girl, 163–164.
11. See also Johannes Lang, “Questioning Dehumanization: Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the Nazi Concentration and Death Camps,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 225–246; Paul Bloom, “The Root of All Cruelty?,” New Yorker, November 27, 2017; Harriet Over, “Seven Challenges for the Dehumanization Hypothesis,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 16, no. 1 (2021): 3–13. 3
12. Heinrich Himmler, Der Untermensch, trans. Hermann Feuer and Bulat Sultanov (SS Office: Berlin 1942), http://
13. Cited in David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 60.
14. For example, Linn Normand, Demonization in International Politics: A Barrier to Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
15. Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (New York: Vintage, 2010), 145. The quoted material is from Jakob Döpler’s 1693 Theatrum Punarum and Jodocus Damhouder’s (1562) Praxis Rerum Criminalium. See E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987).
16. Eugen Bleuler, “Vortrag über Ambivalenz,” Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse 1 (1910): 266–268; Sigmund Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958): 97–108.
17. Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), 21–22.
18. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 28.
19. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 30.
20. You may have noticed that I use the words “belief,” “representation,” and even “conception,” more or less interchangeably in this book. I use all of them in a theoretically low-key manner. However, a more thoroughgoing analysis of the cognitive processes underpinning dehumanization may well need to pull these three things apart and characterize them more precisely. In this connection, Eric Schwitzgebel may be correct in arguing that the contradictory mental state that drives dehumanization is not best characterized in terms of the dehumanizer entertaining incompatible beliefs. Eric Schwitzgebel, “Believing in Monsters: David Livingstone Smith on the Subhuman,” Nautilus, September 11, 2020, https://
21. See, for example, F. Castelli, F. Happé, U. Frith, and C. Frith, “Movement and Mind: A Functional Imaging Study of Perception and Interpretation of Complex Intentional Movement Patterns,” NeuroImage 3, no. 12 (2000): 314–325; R. Desimone and J. Duncan, “Neural Mechanisms of Selective Visual Attention,” Annual Revue of Neuroscience 18 (1995): 193–222.
22. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 18.
23. Adrian Bridge, “Romanians Vent Old Hatreds against Gypsies: The Villagers of Hadereni are Defiant about Their Murder of ‘Vermin,’ ” The Independent, October 19, 1993.
24. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 218.
25. Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (1997): 12.
26. Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 12.
27. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Nori Kagegi, Robotics and Automation Magazine (June 2012): 98–100. See also, for example, Chin Chang Ho and Karl F. MacDorman, “Revisiting the Uncanny Valley Theory: Developing and Validating an Alternative to the Godspeed Indices,” Computers in Human Behavior 26, no. 6 (2010): 1508–1518; Shensheng Wang, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Philippe Rochat, “The Uncanny Valley: Existence and Explanations,” Review of General Psychology 19, no. 3 (2015): 393–407; Jasia Reichardt, Robots: Fact, Fiction (New York: Studio Books, 1978).
28. Mori, “Uncanny Valley,” 100.
29. Plato, The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 136.
30. There are numerous interpretations of what is going on in Plato’s account. See, for example, Rana Saadi Liebert, “Pity and Disgust in Plato’s Republic: The Case of Leontius,” Classical Philology 108, no. 3 (2013): 179–201.
31. Arthur Machen, The House of Souls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 116.
32. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 44–45.
33. Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi, trans. Miranda Richmond Mouillot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1–3.
34. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Exterminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 319–320.
35. Goldhagen, Worse Than War, 320.
36. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 44. Note that Carroll, drawing on Douglas, holds that there are also other ways that a being can be cognitively threatening—by being formless, incomplete, or interstitial. I do not discuss these other kinds of cognitive threat because they are not pertinent to the theory of dehumanization.
37. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 33.
38. See Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Gender and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).
1. See Charlotte Witt’s fascinating discussion of Aristotle’s notion of “deformed” kinds in her Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
2. Kathleen Parker, “To Understand What a Weird, Wicked World We Live in, Look at These Abortion Laws,” Washington Post, February 1, 2019.
3. Michael Spielman, “Is Dehumanization Always Intrinsically Unjust?,” Abort73.com, February 23, 2017, https://
4. Spielman, “Is Dehumanization Always Intrinsically Unjust?”
5. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 60.
6. For a detailed history, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1998).
7. Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter, “A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 6, no. 3 (2014): 352–359.
8. Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter, “The Racial Bias Embedded in Darren Wilson’s Testimony,” Washington Post, November 26, 2014.
9. John Paul Wilson, Kurt Hugenberg, and Nicholas Rule, “Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 1 (2017): 59.
10. Wilson, Hugenberg, and Rule, “Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size,” 59.
11. Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison, Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526–545.
12. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34.
13. Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Script. http://
14. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 49.
15. Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi, trans. Miranda Richmond Mouillot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 31.
16. Hinton Rowan Helper, Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (New York: George W. Carleton, 1867), 81.
17. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Civitas, 1998), 211–212.
18. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119.
19. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 10.
20. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 49.
21. Frederick Douglass, “The Horrors of Slavery and England’s Duty to Free the Bondsman,” In The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 1, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 371.
22. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1998), 331.
23. Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
24. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 8.
25. Patterson, Rituals of Blood.
26. Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 202.
27. Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 213.