Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self

Author:   Ladelle McWhorter
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:  

9780226843582


Pages:   282
Publication Date:   19 November 2025
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Available To Order   Availability explained
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Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self


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Full Product Details

Author:   Ladelle McWhorter
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.513kg
ISBN:  

9780226843582


ISBN 10:   0226843580
Pages:   282
Publication Date:   19 November 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Question of How to Live 1. “God Is No Respecter of Persons”: The Modern Person’s Ancestors from the Ancients to the English Civil Wars 2. Subject of/to Judgment: John Locke and God’s Three Persons 3. Imposing Personhood: African Enslavement and Indigenous Resistance 4. Sovereign Persons, Nonpersons, and Corporate Persons: The United States in the Nineteenth Century 5. Questioning Ownership 6. Questioning Individuality 7. Imagining Life After Personhood   Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

Reviews

“With subtlety and acumen, McWhorter has written a powerful critique of the concept of personhood. Never content with a broadside, McWhorter offers a genealogical history of the concept, showing the important role it has played in isolating us from one another. In addition, she points the way to thinking about ourselves otherwise, creating routes to solidarity. Unbecoming Persons will change the way we think about who and where we are and how we got here.” -- Todd May, Warren Wilson College “McWhorter is without doubt the most masterful genealogist and visionary experimenter in the tradition of Foucault writing today. Unbecoming Persons is an experience book that shakes loose seemingly obvious truths about what it means to be a person and makes it difficult to go on being one. For anyone wanting to live otherwise, McWhorter shows a way.” -- Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign “Unbecoming Persons is an urgent, beautifully argued, and movingly personal call for letting go of being persons. McWhorter presents an ethos for living in a world gone wrong because it has been made wrong. She shows us how the world can be unmade, remade, and made otherwise if we are willing to get free of personhood. This book is diagnostic, moving, and persuasive, which is to say, it is deeply philosophical.” -- Andrew Dilts, Loyola Marymount University


Author Information

Ladelle McWhorter is the Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Emerita at the University of Richmond. Her books include Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy.

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