Human Dignity and Political Criticism is an important and timely intervention into debates about human dignity. Even as critics of dignity urge us to move past this archaic concept, many of the leading documents that encapsulate the spirit of the twentieth century—an age of decolonization, of rights-revolutions, of constitutional and transnational protections against their infringement—partake of what Colin Bird terms “[d]ignitarian humanism” (p. x). Dignity retains a powerful hold on our ethical and political imaginations. Human Dignity and Political Criticism thoughtfully and imaginatively identifies the conditions within which these dignitarian convictions become philosophically justified.

The book is divided into three sections. The first lays out the political and philosophical stakes of, and the book’s unique contributions to, debates on dignity. The second critiques dominant approaches to dignity (Kantian, existential, etc.). The third and longest section of the book develops an alternative “revisionist” account of dignity.

Despite its revisionist aims, Bird retains from “dignitarian humanism” its emphasis on “unconditional[ity],” “universal[ity],” and the fact that it is committed to upholding people’s “worth” (p. 30). Rather than rely on philosophical abstractions, however, Bird’s turn to everyday metaphors of dignity and respect makes these commitments more amenable to political judgment. This is because metaphors often reveal implicit philosophical and ethical commitments and thus help us evaluate our political condition “more intelligently” (p. 25). They move us beyond a formalistic and decontextualized understanding of human dignity toward a more “fundamentally practical” account (p. 38; emphasis in original).

Bird’s emphasis on ordinary language pays rich dividends throughout the book. Chapter 4 develops a fourfold typology of a “dignitarian consciousness” (p. 52) from such metaphors. For example, what Bird terms “A-Dignity,” is the kind that we endanger through an embarrassing act. Contrastingly, “B-Dignity” is “an inner possession” that cannot be harmed or taken away through acts of cruelty (p. 57). John Rawls’s (1971) intuition in A Theory of Justice that self-respect has “social bases” is a paradigmatic example of “C-Dignity.” Dignity in Rawls’s sense is invulnerable to damage, even though it is socially affirmed. Finally, “D-Dignity,” which is the kind that Bird finds most defensible, is an ambient property that arises in the company of others and is susceptible to diminishment. As Bird writes in a later chapter, it is the product of ongoing interactions between people about what matters, or more precisely, “how we matter relative to each other” (p. 204). There is, therefore, an irreducibly social and political element to “D-Dignity.”

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 develop objections to “A,” “B,” and “C” types of dignity. Briefly, the Kantian tradition of “B-Dignity” depends upon a “charisma” (p. 80) that, although identifying a supposedly invariant attribute of the self, depends upon “metaphysical and quasi-religious assumptions” (p. 72). Bird’s thoughtful analysis yields the startling insight that the Kantian framing may overlap with existential accounts of dignity because both fail to account for socially determined facets of dignity (p. 86). Finally, “C-Dignity” fails to capture phenomena like “humiliation, abasement, devaluation, dehumanization, and so on” that often mar people’s sense of their dignity (p. 101). The remaining chapters develop a revised version that casts dignity as a “transient, vulnerable, and socially extended quality” (p. 113) that can then be used to judge institutions for how well they defend dignity.

This is where Human Dignity and Political Criticism’s contributions are particularly striking. Bird innovatively employs Marx and Hayek to develop an account of valuation and price that he then connects to debates on dignity. The capitalist relation to “abstract labor,” as Marx describes it, captures some of the dehumanizing effects of indignity. In a parallel way, much as changing price signals adjust forms of economic cooperation in Hayek’s models, the “circulation” of respect “condition the terms on which agents consciously adjust to one another” (p. 204). Put together, this novel deployment of an economic framework demonstrates the social bases for dignity and the circulation of valorization.

The implication for advocates of dignity is that they can thus read the social and political valence of injuries to dignity in more starkly political terms. Slavery and genocide are not merely attacks on abstract human personhood; they were experienced by those who suffered them as attacks also on their own sense of worth. Bird’s analysis helps us understand what has gone wrong when someone feels their sense of worth diminished. In such cases, human beings have experienced “devalorization” such that they have “los[t] the power to induce others to accord them … respect” (p. 214). Apart from its moral implications, such a loss of worth is deeply injurious to a democratic politics that depends on citizens treating each other as equally equipped with powers of public reasoning and persuasion.

Having read this thought-provoking and compelling book, I am eager to learn more about the implications of its methodological choices. I have two questions: (1) How extensively can ordinary language diagnose injuries to worth? (2) How universal is such an account of human dignity? As I read it, Human Dignity and Political Criticism subscribes both to the value of accurately mapping the affective responses to injuries and to the universality of “D-dignity.” To the first question: Can ordinary language capture a sense of devaluation in terms that are internal to the language within which oppression occurs? This is an epistemic problem to be sure, but one with considerable practical import. As feminist and subaltern scholars remind us, limitations placed on dominated groups are often hard to pinpoint because the language that might help capture their effects often prevent their recognition. How would the sense of devaluation that “D-Dignity” identifies guide our practical judgment in such cases?

As for the second question, it would be foolhardy to deny Bird his claim that despite the “contingency” of where a concept appears, it is still “compatible with the possibility that certain values are common to many, perhaps all, actual human cultures” (p. 39). This is undeniably true. But the upshot of the contextualized approach that Bird champions is that these values are not expressed in the same way, nor need they be subject to similar economies. Does “D-dignity” have valence in social contexts guided by values other than those which inform commercial societies?

These questions in no way undermine the central argument of this very good book. Rather, they merely develop future lines of inquiry from its novel and suggestive themes. Thinkers devoted to untangling the knotty problem that human dignity represents will find much that is useful in it. And, like some other recent contributions to the literature on the Scottish Enlightenment, this work adopts the view that our affective sensibilities provide valuable information on which to base our political judgment. Indeed, it goes further by making a philosophically sound case for this claim.