David Smith's 'Less than Human' recommended on the U of Chicago Law School website
Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at The University of Chicago Law School, recommended David Livingstone Smith's latest book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, on the Law School's website in an annual column titled Smith is a Â鶹´«Ã½associate professor of philosophy and religious studies.
"His book offers a gripping history of the horrific ways in which human beings have turned other humans into 'sub-humans' and 'beasts in human form,' from American rhetoric rationalizing African slavery, to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, to the justifications offered for the genocide in Rwanda. He identifies a key thematic in all these campaigns of dehumanization: namely, convincing the persecutors that, when it comes to the persecuted, there is a difference between being essentially human and merely appearing human. He then speculates (not always plausibly, but provocatively nonetheless) that the propensity to draw an essence/appearance distinction is a legacy of natural selection itself. One need not find the evolutionary speculation convincing to nonetheless find his synthesis of the ways in which the essence/appearance distinction figures in the rhetoric of hatred and genocide throughout history insightful and memorable."