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Five years ago, Christia Mercer casually asked me over dinner what I’d choose to investigate, were I were to contribute to her (then) new series of books, Oxford Philosophical Concepts. I hadn’t anticipated the question, and yet my reply was immediate. “Dignity.”
The truth is, I had already been mulling over the idea of writing a history of human dignity. I had been working on the subject since 2006, but with a growing dissatisfaction over the lack of any concerted historical treatment of the concept. However, I had also concluded that it was foolish to think I could write dignity’s history by myself. I had wanted to write the history of dignity from its origins: From ancient honor cultures and Greco-Roman philosophical ethics, through early Christian, Islamic, and medieval theology, across the revolutionary eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, right up to the doorstep of our contemporary worldview. But to do that myself, and to do it well, ended up seeming like hubris to me. The history of dignity needed a collection of scholars with an array of languages and specializations. And thus it was a stroke of high fortune to have met Christia Mercer when I did. She gave me the opportunity to produce what I alone could not make possible. I owe her a debt I cannot repay, though I hope the book before you proves some reward for her faith in my vision, her wise guidance, and her unfailing encouragement over the intervening years.
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