Common Humanity

Holocaust denial, racism, genocide of indigenous peoples and the long-lasting harms inflicted by colonialism pose deep challenges to any idea of a common humanity. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a shared morality? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonizes in A Common Humanity. Hatred with forgiveness, evil with love, suffering with compassion, and the mundane with the precious. Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the empty language of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simon Weil, Primo Levi and Iris Murdoch, amongst others, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface and a substantial Postscript by the author, in which he revisits some of the main themes of A Common Humanity and engages with responses to it since it was first published.