"Humanity" and its limits in early modern European thought

László Kontler sketches an analytical scheme for investigating the development of notions of “humanity” (mankind, humanité, Menschheit) in modern European culture as a context for the study of dehumanization. He argues that the consideration of the diversity versus unity, and diversity within unity, of mankind was determined by 16th and 17th-century versions of three important interpretive frameworks: the temporalization of human difference, the historicization of nature, and steps toward the naturalization of man. Against this background, the Chapter offers an overview of the redrawing of the boundaries of the human in response to the experience of European penetration into other world regions, and internal intellectual developments from the Reformation through the revival of philosophical skepticism and the rise of the new science, to modern natural law. Throughout, thinking the human and dehumanization as its corollary were responding to particular experiences and developing within the three patterns of thought mentioned above. The quest for humanity remained a thoroughly contingent pursuit, and “mankind” an unstable notion, over several centuries of intense European engagement with the subject.