Welcome to Current Affairs.

My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by the philosopher David Livingston Smith. He is a professor

of philosophy at the University of New England. He's the author of a number of books, including less than human,

Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others on Inhumanity, Dehumanization and How to Resist It,

and Making Monsters the Uncanny Power of Dehumanization published by Harvard University Press.

David Livingston Smith, thank you for joining us on current affairs today.

Well, thank you for inviting me.

Now let me ask you, you know, not all of your work, but a great deal of your work has been

concerned with this concept of dehumanization.

And I want to first ask you, what is it about this one concept, this one phenomenon that has made it so important that you have dedicated so much time to trying to fathom it?

Well, it's a phenomenon which has not been adequately studied or theorized.

So 99% of the literature on dehumanization is done by social psychologists.

And I think that their approach does not do it justice.

We need to, simply psychologically,

the approach taken by social psychologists

doesn't do justice to the paradigmatic historical examples of dehumanization.

And before my work, as far as I've been able to determine, and I've scoured the literature,

there was just no attention paid to the history of the concept, to the way it's panned out,

you know, as is very specific phenomenon, very

particular phenomenon, as far back as the records allow us to determine. And there hasn't

been real, I think, good work on trying to figure out not only what it is, how do we conceive of dehumanization, but once we

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