The Production of Dignity: Ideological Creativity For and Against Empire

Abstract

Recent debates over “the concept of dignity” have tended to posit it as a potential legitimating principle for what Jürgen Habermas terms “just political orders.” Within these debates, theorists have tended to represent dignity as an essentially singular idea whose immanence in the so-called Western tradition was broadly “discovered” in the 1940s against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Breaking this frame, I develop an approach that considers “dignity” primarily as keyword rather than concept—that is, as a word around which the language of a particularly salient vector of political struggle has come to be structured in a given historical conjuncture; a site of ideological creativity through which social conditions or transformations are represented in a variety of conflicting ways to motivate and/or justify political institutions/actions. On this approach, “dignity” is recast as a means of interpreting/representing the dynamism of historical transformation rather than as a concept to be clarified and stabilized as legitimating principle for putatively liberal- democratic institutions. Applying this interpretive method, dignity’s landmark codification in the preamble to the United Nations Charter in relation to “the human person” is re-cognized, not as a discovery, but as the product of an elite project spearheaded by Jan Smuts to shore up imperial social relations in a moment of crisis by means of an effort to universalize the colonial strategy of indirect rule. It also becomes salient that, in direct opposition to this project, “dignity” was subsequently appropriated by figures like Gamal Abdel Nasser and Frantz Fanon and reconfigured to attach, not to the paradigmatic subject of colonial regulation, but to the anticolonial nation. This dissertation undertakes to trace the genesis and dialectical development of these contradictory and antagonistic usages. In developing this alternative interpretive method and historical account, the question arises of whether academic political theorists should be legislating the correct conceptualization of keywords in the first place. Turning to Palestine, I conclude by demonstrating how such projects continue to facilitate a disavowal of the violence underpinning the very institutions on which the claimed authority of the academic political theorist is founded—a disavowal that forecloses on meaningful anticolonial solidarity.W. E. B. Du Bois Centre Mellon FoundationDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)2026-05-1