R. Dean Wright provide an overview of the development in the USA in ‘What is Humanistic Sociology?’, The American Sociologist, 33/4 (Winter 2002): 5–36. In its earliest days it was associated especially with Florian Znaniecki, Charles Cooley, Margaret Mead, Jane Addams and Charles Wright Mills.6 6 Identified mainly with some of the Frankfurt School intellectuals, such as Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson and even Theodor Adorno in some of his work. See for example, Kieran Durkin, The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
7 7 See Introduction, note 4.
8 8 Louis Menand provides an outstanding history of early pragmatism in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (HarperCollins, 2001). He discusses, among others, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Jane Addams and John Dewey. Of the later pragmatists, see Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (Basic Books, 1975).
9 9 Alfred McClung Lee, Sociology for Whom? (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 44–5.
10 10 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Penguin, 2003 [1978]), p. xx; see also Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Palgrave, 2004).
11 11 More recently, sociologist Daniel Chernilo, in Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2017), has approached the problem another way. With a careful scrutiny of major theorists from just one particular discipline (sociology), he shows how humanist ideas – like responsibility (Hans Jonas), reflexivity (Margaret Archer) and language (Jürgen Habermas) – develop in their work. Here, a multiplicity of key words for humanity could be traced back to such discussions.
12 12 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Allen Lane, 2018).
13 13 See Pankaj Mishra, ‘Grand Illusion’, New York Review of Books, 19 November 2020, pp. 31–2.
14 14 A small sampling of this work, which I draw on here, includes: Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Polity, 2007); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Paradigm, 2014) and The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Duke University Press, 2018); Bernd Reiter, Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2018); Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, A World of Many Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018); Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2020).
15 15 See de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South, p. 164.
16 16 Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, trans. John Willett (Methuen, 1986), p. 108.
17 17 For some of this debate, see Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, eds, Secularization and the World Religions (Liverpool University Press, 2009); Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religions and World Politics (Eeerdmans, 1999).
18 18 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Black Swan, 2006); Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Atlantic Books, 2007).
19 19 The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, ed. Andrew Copson and A. C. Grayling (2015), brings together more than twenty contributors. There is a wonderful opening essay, which outlines many main features of humanism today. It is also made very clear that the anti-religious definition is the real definition of humanism. Stephen Law’s Humanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010) also takes this view. See also Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism (Yale University Press, 2014).
20 20 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Vintage, 2011), p. 465.
21 21 See Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen, Wonders of the Universe (HarperCollins, 2011), p. 241.
22 22 See John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (Allen Lane, 2018). With a long history he suggests that secular humanism is only one version of atheism and the least substantial.
23 23 See Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (New York University Press, 2008).
24 24 See Pew Research Center, ‘The Changing Global Religious Landscape’, 5 April 2017: https://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/
25 25 Ulrich Beck, A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence (Polity, 2010).
26 26 See Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego and John Soboslai, God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society (University of California Press, 2015). See also Michael Jordan, In the Name of God: Violence and Destruction in the World’s Religions (Sutton Publishing, 2006); Oliver Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Ros Schwartz (Hurst, 2010).
27 27 Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds, Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (Continuum, 1993).
28 28 See Sandy and Jael Bharat, A Global Guide to Interfaith: Reflections from Around the World (O Books, 2007). An illustration of this at work can be found in Kwok Pui-Lan, Globalization, Gender and Peacebuilding: The Future of Interfaith Dialogue (Paulist Press, 2012).
29 29 Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011); Daisaku Ikeda, A New Humanism (Tauris, 2010); Felix Unger and Daisaku Ikeda, The Humanist Principle: On Compassion and Tolerance (Tauris, 2016).
30 30 Beck, A God of One’s Own, p. 197.
31 31 See ‘For Darwin Day, 6 Facts About the Evolution Debate’: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day/; 18 per cent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans have always existed in their present form.
32 32 See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury, 2014).
33 33 David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford University Press, 2018); Steven Rose, Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene (Vintage, 2005); Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017).
34 34 Cox and Cohen, Wonders of the Universe, p. 3.
35 35 Compare the rather sober Martin Rees, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2018) with the rather extravagant Michio Kaku, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth, 2nd edn (Penguin, 2019).
36 36 This is a key argument in both Cox and Cohen, Wonders of the Universe, and Harari, Sapiens.
37 37 This is life during the age of AI and more. See sociologist Steve Fuller’s Humanity 2.0: What It Means to be Human, Past, Present and Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and physicist Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Allen Lane, 2017).
38 38 See, for example, Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science (Fourth Estate, 2020); Jonathan Marks, Is Science Racist? (Polity, 2017).
39 39 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 105; see also Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Routledge, 2011).
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