Technicians of Human Dignity

"Technicians of Human Dignity" traces the extraordinary rise of human dignity as a defining concern of religious, political and bioethical institutions over the last half-century and offers original insight into how human dignity has become threatened by its own success. The global expansion of dignitarian politics has left dignity without a stable set of meanings or referents, unsettling contemporary economies of life and power.

Engaging anthropology, theology, and bioethics, Bennett grapples with contemporary efforts to mobilize human dignity as a counter-response to the biopolitics of the human body, and the breakdowns this has generated. To do this, he investigates how actors in pivotal institutions — the Vatican, the United Nations, U.S. Federal Bioethics — reconceived human dignity as the bearer of intrinsic worth, only to become frustrated by the Sisyphean struggle of turning its conceptions into practice.