Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Interview with Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Host: Sarah Tyson
Guest: Ladelle McWhorter
Date: October 20, 2025

This episode features a wide-ranging philosophical conversation between Sarah Tyson and Ladelle McWhorter about McWhorter’s latest book, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self. Through a mix of personal story, historical analysis, and social critique, McWhorter argues that the modern concept of “personhood” is historically contingent, conceptually fraught, and perhaps no longer serves emancipatory or ethical purposes. The discussion explores the genealogy of personhood, its links to ownership and corporate power, its foundations in law and theology, and possible alternatives for living and belonging beyond “being a person.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Background and Motivation for the Book

• [02:59] McWhorter shares her background growing up in Alabama, her blue-collar roots, and feeling “just a little bit out of place almost everywhere,” which made her “pretty observant and listen carefully to figure out what's going on.”
• Writing the book stemmed from frustration about large-scale social issues: environmental crisis, corporate dominance, race and activism.
• The catalyst was feeling powerless as an individual against the influence of corporations, exemplified by a moment debating whether to use an electric dryer to protest Dominion Energy ([09:00]: “I just lost it...it actually won't make any difference. It really won't. If I use this dryer or I don't use this dryer, it's not going to save the planet, it's not going to save the world, it's not going to even be noticed… So we use the dryer. And that was just a feeling of defeat.”)

2. The Problem with Personhood

• [14:03] McWhorter moved from asking “Can I be a good person?” to a deeper questioning: “Maybe there’s something wrong with trying to be a person.”
• Personhood, as a concept, is not natural or universal but a historically-specific way of organizing moral life.
• The “good person” ideal is entangled with frustrated and atomized moral agency in a world structured by forces beyond individual control.

3. Why a Genealogical Method?

• [14:56] Genealogy (inspired by Foucault) allows tracing the concept’s history without metaphysical presuppositions, instead tracking the social and historical shifts that shaped current ideas.
• Stories discovered in historical documents—especially English texts from the 17th century—illustrate changes in how “person” was understood ([15:56]: “I had come across this set of documents...where the word person occurs...in contexts where it makes no sense to me...So something seemed to have happened when people. When a word changes its meaning...”)
• Two main sources identified:
  • Roman Law: 'Person' as legal status, not as human being; not all humans were persons, and some persons were not human.
  • Trinitarian Theology: The doctrine of three divine persons in Christianity influenced debates and definitions.

4. The Modern Emergence of Universal Personhood

• [22:19] The English context of the late 17th century, especially around John Locke, melded these traditions to retool “person” as a universal, egalitarian moral subject—ostensibly raising everyone up but with significant drawbacks.
• Locke makes personhood about ownership: all are accountable because they “own their actions,” but this does not equate to economic or political equality ([27:52]: “He makes everybody an owner. Personhood was about ownership property in the...world...But everybody's a person. And that means everybody is, Locke thinks, accountable for their actions.”)
• Being a person did not, in practice, protect from slavery or dispossession; it justified them by a twisted logic of accountability and property rights.

5. Personhood, Slavery, and Dispossession

• [26:42] The personhood discourse justified colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples and rationalized chattel slavery.
• Locke and contemporaries used the language of persons to argue that indigenous people and slaves were accountable as persons—but could (and, in Locke’s argument, should) be dispossessed or enslaved if failing the expectations of “proper” persons.
• “Being a person didn't get you freedom...Your station in life was to be a slave. And that was. That was simply right. And of course, being a person didn't mean you could hold on to your land...” ([35:56])

6. Rise of Corporate Personhood

• [38:06] The Roman legal tradition's “corporate person” resurged in 19th-century America, enabling business entities ever-greater power and legal protection.
• Originally, incorporation was tightly controlled and justified by “public benefit,” but over time, corporations gained increasing independence, culminating in legal recognition of corporate civil rights, especially after the 14th amendment and cases like Citizens United ([43:00]).
• Memorable explanation: “Corporations came to be able to exercise civil rights. And because they are...so much assets, and so much now political power and now claim civil rights against any governmental body that tries to regulate them, that individual persons, the rest of us really can't fight them. Not in those terms anyway.” ([44:44])

7. Ownership as the Core of Personhood

• [47:32] Modern moral personhood is pervaded by the notion of ownership—of actions, emotions, even one's health and destiny.
• McWhorter scrutinizes management jargon about “owning your feelings/career/education,” finding it comically inadequate: “Take ownership of your life, you know, and it seems to mean all kinds of things about just, you know, take the bull by the horns, get ahead, whatever...but when I started substituting other kinds of words for take ownership of, I came to see that most of those words brought me into context of relationships.” ([51:30])
• Changing language from ownership to relationality can shift moral imagination: “When we really put that in alternative phrasing, we end up with things like, I need to be more responsive to my friends or my spouse, more honest with my children about my expectations… it brings up all the ways in which we're actually related to other people rather than the ways in which we're responsible and on our own.” ([52:17])

8. Learning from Indigenous and Alternative Traditions

• McWhorter discusses how some Indigenous American groups and historical experiments (like St. Francis and the Franciscans) actively resisted the imposition of ownership categories onto land, beings, or themselves ([55:00]).
• Suggests we have much to learn from traditions that treat land, life, and community as belonging, connection, or stewardship rather than property.

9. Dismantling Individualism: Rethinking Individuation and Relationality

• [57:17] Addresses the limits of radical individualism and resists jumping to “radical monism.” Instead, she advocates for an account of difference and individuation rooted in relationship and interdependency, citing work such as Leanne Simpson’s on Indigenous diplomacy and boundary-rituals.
• Looks to science for speculative accounts of how difference and self/other distinctions emerge even in animal biology.

10. Toward an Ethos of Active Belonging

• In the concluding section, McWhorter proposes “belonging” as a more fruitful alternative to ownership or personhood: “Instead of that things belong to me, that I belong. I belong to a community, I belong to an ecosystem, I belong to a nation, you know, all kinds of things. And those, those belongings...are not claims of ownership and obligation, but they are connection, claims of connection. And we belong to things we hate sometimes or things that don't want us...but that does not mean we don't belong. The belonging is first.” ([63:32])
• She frames this as a “framework of exploration or experimentation” rather than prescription, urging creative practices for active belonging.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ladelle McWhorter on the futility of individual moral gestures:
  “It actually won't make any difference. It really won't. If I use this dryer or I don't use this dryer, it's not going to save the planet, it's not going to save the world, it's not going to even be noticed. Dominion Energy is not going to notice my paltry little protest.” ([09:00])
• On the core of personhood:
  “Personhood was about ownership property in the...world...But everybody's a person. And that means everybody is, Locke thinks, accountable for their actions.” ([27:52])
• On Locke’s use of personhood to justify colonization:
  “The argument for dispossessing them was it was our duty to dispossess them because they were basically abusing this big...all these resources. They weren't using it like they were supposed to and as persons should have been doing so they were irresponsible, bad persons. So dispossess them. Sure, take it.” ([30:58])
• On corporate power and personhood:
  “Corporations came to be able to exercise civil rights. And because they are...so much assets, and so much now political power and now claim civil rights against any governmental body that tries to regulate them, that individual persons, the rest of us really can't fight them. Not in those terms anyway.” ([44:44])
• On replacing ownership with relationality:
  “When we really put that in alternative phrasing, we end up with things like, I need to be more responsive to my friends or my spouse, more honest with my children about my expectations… it brings up all the ways in which we're actually related to other people rather than the ways in which we're responsible and on our own.” ([52:17])
• On “belonging” as foundational:
  “The belonging is first. That's what I'm striving to think with anyway. The belonging is real. We really do belong. We belong together, we belong here, we belong on this planet.” ([63:32])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:59 | McWhorter’s background and the book’s origin | | 09:00 | Story of the dryer, frustration, and question of being a good person | | 14:32 | Turn to genealogy; why investigate the history of personhood | | 22:19 | The transformation of “person” in English history and via Locke | | 26:42 | Personhood’s role in justificatory projects of slavery and dispossession | | 38:06 | Corporate “personhood,” its history, and consequences | | 47:32 | The concept of ownership: management literature and the language of “owning” | | 55:00 | Indigenous and religious resistance to owning land, people, or being | | 57:17 | The challenge of moving beyond radical individualism; individuation as difference in relationship | | 63:32 | An “ethos of active belonging” and concluding reflections |

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Flow & Tone

The conversation is candid, searching, sometimes wry, and deeply philosophical but always attentive to concrete historical, social, and personal contexts. McWhorter’s approach is self-aware—she avoids grand prescriptions, uses personal stories to make abstract discussions vivid, and acknowledges the exploratory and unfinished character of philosophical questioning.

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For Listeners

If you have not read the book or heard the episode, this discussion offers a profound, critical look at how the very notion of the “person”—so central to modern politics, ethics, and law—might actually entrap us, and how other forms of belonging, relationship, and difference might serve us better in confronting planetary crises, corporate power, and our desire to live good lives together.

Transcript

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[Liddell McWhorter]

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[Liddell McWhorter]

New Books Network.

[Sarah Tyson]

Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. I'm co host of the channel along with Carrie Figdor, Robert Talese, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Liddell McWhorter, Stephanie Bennett Smith, Chair of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Emerita at the University of Richmond. Her book Unbecoming Persons the Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self is just out from the University of Chicago. How should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In unbecoming persons, McWhorter reorients these questions through a genealogy of the concept of personhood. That genealogy is in the service of showing us not only that personhood is historically contingent, but that it is also optional. In Unbecoming Persons we can feel relief, vital belonging and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together. Lidell McWhorter, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Thank you for having me. Delighted to be here.

[Sarah Tyson]

Well, let's start off with hearing a bit about you and your background as a philosopher and how you came to write this book.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Well, I was, I grew up in Alabama and in a blue collar family and was fortunate enough to be able to go to college a scholarship student. But, and so my background really is always somebody that has been just a little bit out of place almost everywhere I've ever lived or been. And as a result, I guess people who feel a little bit out of place are oftentimes they try to be pretty observant and listen carefully to figure out what's going on. I often have felt over my life that things were just a little weird or hard to understand. And I think that's what drove me into philosophy. It's the questioning of things, not necessarily to prove anything or expose anything, but just to figure out the world or at least if I can't figure it out, to ask some interesting questions that propel me in interesting directions. So that's, that's really where I come from in some basic way. This is the third monograph that I've written and I came to it well, I write very slowly. I've, I've, my career has been primarily in undergraduate education and at, at good liberal arts colleges. And I've, I've enjoyed that work very much. But it is, as you know, labor intensive. You spend a lot of time in the classroom, a lot of time with students, a lot of time on committee work. So writing is something you do when you have a little bit of extra time, summers or sabbaticals or breaks. So it usually takes me about a decade to do a book. And, and so that explains why there have been just the three. This one took about 12 years, really, I think, from beginning to end. It began in frustration, as books often do, when I just couldn't figure something out. I couldn't figure out how to deal with some of the big issues of our time, I guess you might say. The second book that I wrote, the one that had come out before I began, this one was on race and racism and, and sexual oppression and connections, among those things. And I had found that I was able to grapple with questions of race, which had been part of my life always growing up In Alabama, you can imagine that that had been something that I was always aware of, but always also felt overwhelming. It. It was hard to get any kind of handle on race and racism when it was so ubiquitous and so powerful. So I spent 10 years grappling with that and coming to some, coming to terms in a certain way, learning how to think about it conceptually, historically, and all of that. So when I finished that book, I had. I was. I guess, at that point, I had been involved with various kinds of activism for some time, but I was more and more drawn to issues that had to do with climate change and environmentalism, and I was teaching environmental ethics regularly. So combining the various forms of activism that I had done, the work on race, dismantling, racism, work that I'd done with a group called Virginia Organizing here in Virginia, where I live, and then this. This deep need to somehow address the changes that are going on in the world around us environmentally, and realizing how involved all of that was with. With social issues, political issues, racial issues, and you may also remember something called the Great Recession that happened to do. I suddenly got very interested also in economic theory. And so I started doing a lot of reading about corporations. And around the time that that was occurring in 2010, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case called Citizens United and declared that money was actually a form of speech. And corporations are persons with the right to free speech. And so they have the right to put money into political campaigns in various ways. That seemed like a disaster to me in the midst of environmental crisis, as well as other kinds of issues, social issues. And I wanted to know what I should. What could I do? What should I do? How. How do you live a good life in the face of the overwhelming power of large corporations who are doing all kinds of environmental and social damage in the world? How. How can somebody like me and you. How can we have an effect, a positive effect in the world? How can we. And even not having a positive effect, how can we avoid having terrible negative effects? And I was really frustrated with that. And so I began this book with, you know, at sea, as I usually do, and a sort of cloud, a fog of confusion and. And frustration. And I don't know if you want me to continue this story or not, but I can explain why that led me to the question of personhood. I didn't start out with the question of personhood at all, but that's where I ended up with that set of dilemmas, I guess.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah. Do you mind just sketching for us how you got from Kind of losing it with the dryer to the question of personhood and seeing, seeing that modern personhood's gonna get us all killed.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yeah. So I tell this story in the introduction to the book and often this is true in my other books too, that I often open with a story about why I am writing this book, what is the problem that I'm seeing. And that's true in this as well. So the story with the dryer, it's really a culmination of a whole lot of things that happened over the course of several. But I was becoming very worried about the power of a particular corporation in, in the state of Virginia, which is Dominion Energy. It's, it's not just in the state of Virginia, but it's, it is the biggest power company in the state of Virginia and pretty much has a monopoly on power production and delivery in my part of the state. And after the Enron scandal and all these things that were going on in corporate America, I could just imagine that Dominion was going to keep raising rates as they have done, and keep building terrible, terrible fossil fuel guzzling equipment and pipelines that were going to leak and all kinds of stuff which they have continued to do by the way. And now they are also building for data centers in my area. And I wanted to not use their product. I mean that was the bottom line. I didn't want to contribute to their well being by using their product and paying them money any more than I absolutely had to. But of course I didn't really want to live without electricity and I'm not sure that would have been possible. So what I tried to do is minimize my usage as many people do, as all of us probably do, and when we can. And I was struggling to minimize my usage to the point that I didn't want to use my electric clothes dryer. This is where I just finally realized my spouse was saying, you know, we really need to dry the clothes in clothes dryer. It's not working to hang them all over the house. And you know, these, all these things, what will it matter if we use it once, if we use it twice? And I just, as you say, I just lost it. I just like, oh gosh, it actually won't make any difference. It really won't. If I use this dryer or I don't use this dryer, it's not going to save the planet, it's not going to save the world, it's not going to even be noticed. Dominion Energy is not going to notice my paltry little protest. So why not use the dryer. And so we use the dryer. Yeah. And that. That was just a feeling of just defeat. And how can. How can we live with that as completely defeated people who don't seem to be able to do, to live, to live well, to have, to be moral people? I just found that unacceptable. And the way I was phrasing it to myself was, I cannot be a good person. I just don't see in this world still structured by corporations and large governmental bodies as well, so structured by people so much more powerful than I am in such a world, how can I be a good person? How can I not hurt other people? How can I make sure that the things I buy, the things I use, are not being created by slaves or, you know, little girls losing their eyesight in sweatshops or poisoning people's water systems or fouling the air? You know, how can I. How can I not participate? I wanted to withdraw from all that I thought to be a good person means to not do those things. It means to act on my convictions about what's right and wrong. If I knock and if I cannot act on my convictions, then I just don't know what's left. You know, that's where I was. That's where I was when this book began to take shape. I can't be a good person in this world, and I don't know what's left for us if we can't. But here we are, still alive and still apparently capable of some sorts of action. So how was I going to rethink that in such a way that made it possible to go forward, to live a good life? And I began changing my vocabulary instead of saying, can I be a good person? Can I live a good life? And those are, I think, very different things. That's. And the difference between those two ways of phrasing, it makes a world of difference, as I think I hope my book shows.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yes. And so part of what you do is turn on the notion of person to try to think through. Like, maybe there's something wrong there.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Right.

[Sarah Tyson]

Maybe right with being a person.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Maybe there's something wrong with trying to be a person. That's where I ended up. And I don't remember exactly what led me to that. I can tell you a little bit about why I began to focus on the word person. But, yeah, so the. So the question came to be, what is it about thinking in terms of being a good person that is causing me to be stuck? How is that making me be stuck? And so that's What I began to investigate.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah, and you decided to investigate genealogically, and you give a pretty robust account of why. And so do you mind sketching a bit about why you decided to develop your curiosity?

[Liddell McWhorter]

Right.

[Sarah Tyson]

That this frustration sort of turns to curiosity. I think you pick it up, right? You pick the frustration up and try to do something with it. And so why genealogy?

[Liddell McWhorter]

Well, that's my training philosophically. I've always worked with the text of Michel Foucault, and I've done genealogical work before. I like that approach because I'm not forced to make a lot of assumptions about metaphysical reality or something. I'm looking at. At historical contexts and processes and how I have been formed. We've been formed, our language has been formed within those processes, within those historical forces. To me, that eliminates some of the ontological guesswork, I suppose. And it also keeps it pretty concrete. It's not real abstract. When you're working with a genealogical method, you have to. You have to find out stuff, you have to investigate events, you have to weigh evidence. And. And I like things to be concrete. And I like stories too. So genealogy is often about. About stories, the stories that have been told to us about how we got where we are and how the world is now, and sometimes half buried stories that are alternatives to the. Those accounts that sometimes are powerful when you give them voice or let them be heard. So genealogy tends to open up some of those alternative accounts or sometimes, I guess, counter stories. So the genealogical method that I use, and it's not a real strict method, but it usually involves looking for a time before in our own historical lineage. I don't do very much with alternative historical lineages. I'm looking at the Western world and US History, things like that. But it involves looking for a time when it appears that people didn't think the way we think now, or they didn't. Their practices didn't evince the same sorts of conceptual categories that we work with now, or something like that. Excuse me. And I had come across that in doing the work for the previous book. I had come across this set of documents, text from the 1650s, 40s and 50s, where the word person occurs. And of course, this is in English, our own language, not that far removed from the way we use it. And here's this word person, occurring in context where it makes no sense to me. What in the world, what is the function of that word in those texts? It doesn't look like it looks in modern texts. In fact, it doesn't even look like it looks in text 40 and 50 years later. So something seemed to have happened when people. When a word changes its meaning, first of all, you want to figure out what it meant before, but then you're really interested in what made it change its meaning. What's going on in that historical period with those people that bring them to reorient themselves around whatever concepts are in question. So that's why I began with. So I'd seen that person had that sort of weird history, and I didn't understand it when I was doing the other research. And so I thought, aha, that's a place to start. So here's a time when the word person in English and our own lineage seems not to have meant what we mean by it. And then here's a time, not very many decades after it, when it seems to mean what we mean. So I could investigate the 1650s and I can investigate the point at which it looks like everything changed. I can see. Try to see what happened in between. And then from there, what I end up doing, as you see in the book, is I identify a couple of strands of historical events that seem to contribute to the change. And the two that I identify most significantly, I think are Roman law, where the word person has a very specific legal one. It changes over time because Roman laws really, you know, unfolds over hundreds of years. But person meant something, a legal. It was a legal status. It was not a human being. It just did not mean human being. And there were lots of human beings who were not persons, and there were some persons who were not human beings in Roman law. So. And that Roman law tradition carries over, of course, into canon law. So it affects all of Europe way after the Roman Empire is gone. And it gets pulled into English in the 12th century, when a lot of Roman legal texts are rediscovered in Italy and elsewhere, and scholars start mostly canon lawyers start, you know, studying it with great deal of vigor and. And sending people to the various cathedrals around Europe, including in the. The British Isles, who, Who now know a lot about Roman law. So it gets incorporated into the Church in important ways with that notion of personhood. That person is a status, it's not a human being. Some human beings have that status. So that Roman law tradition comes in and has not reconfigured common ordinary people's language in the 1650s, but it had participated in that reconfiguration within the next 50 or 60 years. The other tradition is that it also is a Roman tradition. It's the tradition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Christianity. So in Christian theology, that doctrine, of course, also it comes from the Western church. The doctrine of God in three persons, the personhood of which God has three in that tradition, is not the same thing as a human being, quite obviously. And some theologians, in fact, denied that human beings could be persons in that sense at all. So this is a theological concept that's different from the Roman legal concept, although it has some things in common with. It comes out of some of the same discourse and out of the same Latin language. So what I argue in the book, in the genealogy I try to show is that in the 1680s and 90s in England, because of various upheavals and political struggles and so on, including fights over what they called church settlement, that is, would the Church of England be mandatory for every person who lived in England and Scotland, and would they have to pay tithes, which were basically taxes to it, and so on? And what was going on in the colonies as England was expanding into North America and elsewhere. So that that notion of the. Of the Trinity was really, really important in the 1680s and 90s in the political struggle over the church, the church's status and church's power in the government. And the doctrine of Trin. Of the Trinity was at the center of some of those struggles. There were people who, you may have heard of people called Unitarians. There were a bunch of radical British people running around saying, God doesn't have three persons, God is one. And then the Trinitarians trying to defend the Trinity, but from a Protestant perspective, against the Catholics, who said, look, if you believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, that's no more absurd than believing in transubstantiation, so you should believe in transubstantiation too, and just be Catholic. And the Protestants didn't want that. So they had to figure out a way to talk about the doctrine of the Trinity that made it seem logical, unlike the doctrine of transubstantiation. So all of that swirling around, and all these guys are running around trying to figure out how can I defend my particular beliefs? And so John Locke, virtually everybody's heard of him, he emerges in the 1690s with some very important books, the Two Treatises of Government and also the. The. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding. And they're blockbusters. They're really. People think they're great. They think they're great in the British Isles, they think they're great in Scotland. And then of course, they get read in the. In North America and become very influential in the second edition of Locke's essay, he inserts a new chapter in which he defines personhood. Or actually he. He discusses personhood. He hadn't done that in the first edition, probably because he was very. He was very protective of himself, shall we say. He knew the political stakes of talking about the Trinity, for example. He didn't want to get into that fight. So he didn't want to really take a position on a lot of things that might get him into trouble. But he did do this. He talked about personal identity in the book and he was. It's a. Some people have said it is. That part of the essay is worthy of a book unto itself. It's really an important chapter. So when I looked at that chapter, I carefully analyzed that chapter along with the two treatises of government. I could see that the notion of personhood that was operative in Locke and that he was promoting, which has become very influential, melded some strands of Roman law and trinitarian theology. And that made for a different account of personhood than what had been at mid century, at 40, 50 years earlier, and which many radicals in the middle of the century had said, we need to ditch. We need to get rid of this status of personhood that was mainly a legal status because it creates a kind of inequality that's totally unfair to the average person, average human beings. So they wanted to get rid of it because it was a status. And then everybody would just be people and we would. There would not be great landowners and not be enclosures of land and deforestation when landowners wanted to get rid of the forest and sell a lot of timber, make ship masks out of them and stuff. So what had been a very radical anti person movement in the middle of the 17th century was squelched. And then we come 40, 50 years later to have this other concept of personhood that applies to everybody and looks so egalitarian. All human beings are persons. Isn't that nice? So now we've all been elevated to this status that was so significant and noble before. But then of course, I go on, I think, to show that this has a kind of dirty under underbelly, very bad consequences for a lot of people and not just people. Yeah, your question there. I don't. I'm not sure. I'm sure.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think because the other or one of the places I saw work that feels very pressing for understanding why we might not want to be persons now is in the way all of those forces converge into the projects of chattel slavery and indigenous dispossession for the purposes of Colonization and Locke. Locke's there too, right? Like he's at the center of that as well. But part of the, part of what I saw you doing in these genealogical moves, part of what you're saying is it's no surprise Citizens United is no surprise given the, the genealogy of this concept. Right. Like it's never just been about humans or something like this. But also it's maybe not going to do what we hope it'll do, that becoming a person, being able to claim the status of person, is maybe not going to be able to do what we hope it could do politically or for liberatory ends, because of how the concept operates. And that really becomes clear, I think, when you start talking about its operations in these two projects.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yes. So Locke said everybody's a person. And the way he ties this to the status concept of personhood that was operative in Roman law and in English law and canon law before is that he makes everybody an owner. Personhood was about ownership property in the, in the ancient world and in the medieval world. So Locke says, hey, everybody own, everybody's an owner. You own your own actions, right? You have to. You're not. You don't just do stuff. You own those things. You own the actions that you take. And it's because you own your actions that it's possible for you to own things. You may recall this from the Second Treatise of government. He says it's because we mix our labor with natural resources or whatever that we can lay claim to them. So it's because I make the effort to pick the apple off the tree that I'm entitled to consume it, because now it's mine. It's mine because I own the actions that brought it into my possession. So we all own our actions, and therefore we're all persons. That does not mean we actually own any land or that we can even exercise very much control over most of our environment. Some people do. Some persons are still big landowners who enclose their territory and shut out all the peasants and eventually control other kinds of money making enterprises. But everybody's a person. And that means everybody is, Locke thinks, accountable for their actions. So it becomes a moral category. But it does so by way of making us all owners. So we're all owners of our actions. We may or may not end up with any property in that process, but we all are accountable for those actions. And that means, and remember that this comes from Roman law. So persons are able to appear at court either to sue or be sued. They can be charged and accused by other Persons, of course, not by just anybody. Anyway, Locke wants everybody to be accountable. He doesn't want everybody to have property or power. So he's happy to say, you know, the spin, the spinster and the agricultural worker, the poor wage laborer, sure, they're persons, they're owners of their own actions and we can hold them accountable for that. But they don't get to own their equipment or the, or the land they work on or anything like that. They have no, no title to any of that stuff. Well, so when this gets imported, well, even before it gets imported to places like North America, he's already saying things like, you know, if people are lazy and they aren't doing their job, they, we can make them slaves. He was, he was in favor of making poor people in England slaves. He said this and he was certainly not alone. But when he gets imported to, to. I'm just talking about North America because that's what I know most about if I know much of anything. So I'm going to talk about in indigenous peoples first. So you come to North America and Locke did. He didn't go to North America, but, you know, his ideas did and he knew a lot about it because he was actually, he was an absentee landowner in the colony of Carolina and he worked for a group of men who were the colonial proprietors of Caroline, the Carolina colony. So he knew what he was doing. He knew that they were enslaving people and he knew that they were dispossessing people. But he made an argument for why that was okay. And it's because indigenous peoples, I'll start with are persons. And that means that they have, they, they have some duties as persons. They're accountable for what they do, and they're also accountable for what they don't do. And those indigenous peoples, they're not farming, they're not improving the land, they're not doing the things right that all they're doing is running around picking apples and eating them. Except, of course, I don't think there were apples as we think of them in North America at that time. But he was claiming, sight unseen, of course, he was claiming that these people live hand to mouth and they've done that forever. And they obviously just don't care enough to try to civilize themselves, store up for the future, think about taking care, improving the whole stock of goods that human beings might draw on. They should be building fences and damming up streams and, you know, basically farming like good Englishmen. And they aren't doing it and they're using huge tracts of land to get this little amount of food that supports, you know, just a few thousand people. They, they have huge hunting grounds and they have huge gathering grounds. They forage. Now, of course, they really were, in fact, we know, practicing agriculture, and they really were practicing forestry, forest management, all kinds of things they were doing. He just ignored that. But the argument for dispossessing them was it was our duty to dispossess them because they were basically abusing this big, these. All these resources. They weren't using it like they were supposed to and as persons should have been doing so they were irresponsible, bad persons. So dispossess them. Sure, take it. Take their land. It's. It's your. It's not only your right. You have to do it. It's right for you to do it. So this basically became a justification for dispossession of native peoples all over the Americas by the English. Of course, there was already dispossession going on before these arguments were advanced, but Locke did a lot to further them in North America and at least in the English colonies, as the importation of slaves became big business. And this is not. This is already happening in Locke's time, but it of course became much bigger over the. The next century or two. The idea that enslaved people or persons was very important. I mean, we tend now, we think about slavery now oftentimes through events of the 19th century, which are anachronistic for 17th, 18th century slavery, when it was big business already. Because we tend to think that the justification for slavery in English North America was the stuff that people in the 19th century said in defense of it. Now at that point, slavery was under so much political pressure and had gone through so many economic changes, and the people who were apologists for it were scrambling to try to come up with some reason why it was okay. What they said really doesn't reflect what sorts of justifications and practices existed as slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries. So because we tend to do that, though we tend to remember what people said in the 19th century, we tend not to see what all was going on before slaves were persons. Locke was very clear about that. They were morally accountable for what they did, and it was their duty to serve their masters. And when they failed to serve their masters, they were. They should be dealt punishment. So being a person didn't get you freedom, not by any means. Your station in life was to be a slave. And that was. That was simply right. And of course, being a person didn't mean you could hold on to your land as happened to indigenous peoples. It didn't mean anything except that you could be held accountable by the authorities and of course, by God, who was going to punish you severely later. So just get ready for it. So personhood would, instead of being a great liberating force or a great equalizing force, was in fact quite the opposite. It was a. It was a. A tool of class domination, among other things. So when you look at history in that way and you say, geez, no wonder it's hard to be a good person. We, if personhood was never intended or never shaped to be something that we would use for equality, for justice, for freedom, for, for, for thriving of all human beings and other beings, that's not what person was ever intended to do. And quite beyond what it was intended to do, what it was ever capable of doing. Personhood was a way of individualizing actions and responsibilizing people who were basically powerless so that they could be dealt with by powerful men who wanted to exploit them or dispossess them. So yuck.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah, so. And then you develop this. I mean, you painted quite a clear picture. And then when we can think more about when corporations come into this as one of the mechanisms for extracting responsibility, I guess, from the rest of us, your genealogy, as you set up already and what you've said, helps to explain how it's come to be. The persons exerting the most control over the conditions of our lives and the conditions of the planet are corporations. And almost at the end of your genealogy, you make this observation that our individual personhood incapacitates us in the face of corporate personhood. And I think you've really set up to explain how this happens. But how does personhood work in this interlocking way where it could pin us down as individuals while allowing corporations to exert so much control?

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yeah, so we get this resurgence of this old Roman category of the corporate person. And in the 19th century, primarily in the US so corporations have always been persons under the law in our legal tradition and back before our particular legal tradition in the Roman tradition, which simply means that they have a certain legal status that enables them to be property owners, and it enables them to go to sue and be sued, to have standing in court. That's basically what it is. And corporations are really good at those things. Corporations, though in the early centuries of this country, the founders of the United States did not like corporations. They knew that the colonizing agents of much of the east coast had been corporations. And the East India Company was a huge corporation. And these were not exactly the same as corporations in the present day, legally or in practice. But they were corporations. They had a certain legal status that the founders were suspicious of, which is why the federal government does not incorporate. All papers of incorporation are issued by state governments in the United States. So corporations can be established by state governments. They're creatures of the states. And it used to be that legislators had to vote whether something could be a corporation, and corporations were considered to be corporate. Incorporation was granted to a business if its owners wanted it to be, to be incorporated. It was granted to them in order that they might pursue certain public benefits. So not just anybody would incorporate. You could be partnership. You could, you know, could be a single person, could own a business. You didn't have to be a corporation to be a company, to be a. A business of any sort. But incorporation gave you certain powers that the state allowed you to have because it was in the public interest for you, for you or your partners or whoever owned the corporate shares to have to be incorporated. What that meant was that the most important thing it meant anyway was that the people who put the money, who were the investors, the people who put the money into the business were only legal, legally liable for the amount of money they put in. That's all they could lose. So if the corporation screwed up and had lots of debts, then it just went bankrupt. But it didn't necessarily bankrupt those investors. It just meant they lost the money of their investment. That was a huge boon for investors who would invest in a business concern that they weren't involved in running if they couldn't be sure that they wouldn't just be totally ruined by it if it went belly up. So that was one of the big benefits of incorporation and why businesses often sought to be incorporated. But legislators, legislatures wanted to make sure that corporations did something that was beneficial for their people. So they would, for example, incorporate large business concerns like a mine or railroad or something like that, because it took a lot of investors to make those things work. And they were of public benefit. Transportation, energy, you know, any number of reasons why you would think it would be good for your population and in your jurisdiction to have those things. So you would grant some, some, some rights to the people who are willing to put in their investment. That began to change in the 19th century. And in two ways, I guess I should talk about. One way was just that legislatures got, you know, they got. There was a lot of cronyism and they were denying some groups incorporation, and they Were allowing it for others. And it wasn't very. A very fair system, many people thought. And so that many states set up what they called a corporation commission, which is just a bureaucratic entity that would oversee incorporation. So it no longer was voted on every time a business wanted to incorporate, Wasn't voted on by the legislature. So it was less politicized. That seemed like a democratizing event, but it also meant there was less oversight. So corporations started to kind of get more and more, well, a little rowdier. Also. You had to pay a fee to incorporate the. And states, many states started charging fees and thinking, hey, great, we just need to incorporate lots of entities, because then we get lots of fees and we don't have to have taxes. So incorporation was rampant in the 19th century at the same time. And this is a different movement and I think a different. A different set of events that just get linked up. Historical accident in a way. So at the same time now people have begun to think of themselves as persons. And of course, it's America. And we're all equal and we're all persons and we all have. Have rights and, you know, and rightly so. And no longer are we bound by, you know, old ideas of. Of human purpose or station in life or something like that. We're all free. We're free equally so. And so we have, you know, our civil rights. We have. We have the right of free speech, we have the right of religion, free free association. We have the right to bear arms, all kinds of things like that. Because we're persons under the law. Right. We have legal standings as. As American citizens. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment, when persons, all persons born or naturalized in the United States were. Were citizens of the United States. Corporations, big corporations. Now we've got big ones, big railroad companies, big insurance companies, Sugar companies were big then. So think of the very biggest things in the 19th century. Big business that were. That were doing business across state jurisdictions. So no one state can really rein anybody in. These corporations hired lots of attorneys. In fact, some of them ended up being various jurisdictions judges and having influence over the supreme court. They began to say, well, wait, corporations are persons. Don't they have civil rights just like other persons? How can you say a corporation doesn't have the right to free speech or free association or the right to bear arms? Corporations began claiming rights that before had been civil rights of what the law of lawyers call natural persons, that is human beings. When corporations began claiming moral status, that's what that amounts to, the moral status of personhood. Then they became pretty much unstoppable. They began to have rights against the states that incorporated them because they were claiming federal civil rights. They're not incorporated by the federal government, but they're claiming to have civil rights guaranteed by the federal government that the states cannot violate. This happens at the very end of the 19th century, and there's all kinds of political intrigue about this. It was really quite a story. And the details are not fully understood yet, but. So corporations came to be able to exercise civil rights. And because they are, and of course not all, there are lots of little tiny corporations around all over the place that don't operate like this, but very, very large corporations that have so many resources, so much assets, and so much now political power and now claim civil rights against any governmental body that tries to regulate them, that individual persons, the rest of us really can't fight them. Not in those terms anyway. So, yeah, so that's how corporations took over the world, by becoming. Are becoming more than human persons.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah. And so now the genealogy ends and the. What else can we do? Where are the fissures in the cracks? That's where your book moves at that point. And so really central, as you've made clear to personhood, is ownership. And so one of the practices that you have engaged in is to explore and then not deploy any longer the idea of owning everything. So owning your work or owning your life or owning your dog. And so what has that practice gotten you? Why has that work of thinking about when we say own, what else might we mean? What more precisely might we mean? And then in connected to that, who's that led you to listen to or to engage with?

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yes, ownership is so central to the concept of person, whether it's the ancient concept in Roman law or the modern moral concept that grows out of John Locke's work, or even the trinitarian concept that emerged in the late 17th century where God is. God's three persons are each owners of certain kinds of thoughts and memories. But I won't go into that because it's really theologically weird. But so ownership is just a key concept. And I started thinking, well, okay, if personhood seems like something that is really problematic and troubling and something that I don't want to buy into, but how to dismantle that? I mean, how you can't just immediately say, okay, I won't be a person anymore, or I won't think like that anymore. We can't do that. We have to practice our way out if. If we can get out of A, of a, of a conceptual situation like that. So I started trying to think about, well, what do we mean by ownership? And it, it's really complicated. Yeah. So I started looking at legal accounts of ownership and so on, and that was frankly beyond me. I mean, it's really, legally speaking, very complicated. But I also noticed and that, well, of course, Locke's concept of personhood makes us owners of actions, owners of the things that we acquire because of our actions and so on and people nowadays. And actually this is not as new as I thought it was. I thought probably this was only happening in the last few decades, but it's more like about 100 years. People talk about owning things that are like owning or owning up to. People talk about owning their emotions. Like somebody that we say might have an anger management problem, they're supposed to own their anger. Which I think means something like be honest about the fact that you're angry. And you come across this stuff. And I came across it mostly, as I say in the book, in first of all, in management literature. And I thought it was so funny and I couldn't stop, you know, reading this stuff because it struck me as really funny. If you've ever been an employee in any sort of even relatively small bureaucratic structure in a, in a corporation or a university or anywhere, you've had a supervisor who read some management literature and used that lingo and when you start taking it apart, it is so funny. So I'm supposed to own my, you know, take ownership of my career and I'm supposed to take ownership of my, my health. I'm supposed to take ownership of my, my, my work at, at my job. We tell students in university, you know, to take ownership of your education. I know that's just craziness when you start trying to say what does that really mean? And you pull it apart. And I, I went and I actually thought it was, it was just hysterically funny so much of the time that I did spend several pages going through some of this literature. Take ownership of your life, you know, and it seems to mean all kinds of things about just, you know, take the bull by the horns, get ahead, whatever. Don't assume somebody else going to help you just figure it out on your own. Here's how you can compete with your co workers. All of that stuff seems to be tied up with taking ownership. And what I, when I started trying, thinking, well, what words could I substitute? How would it sound if I didn't say it this way? What if I said instead, like I said a minute ago. Be honest about the fact that you're angry with someone or take ownership of your health. Well, be concerned about your well being, talk to your doctor, exercise, things like that. When I started substituting other kinds of words for take ownership of, I came to see that most of those words were. Brought me into context of relationships. When we take ownership of our work, of our education, of our retirement, of our. Of our health, whatever we're going it alone, you know, it's mine and I'm responsible for it. But when we really put that in other alternative kinds of phrasing, we end up with things like, I need to be more responsive to my friends or my spouse, more honest with my children about my expectations. I need to tell my boss that I think my work is worth more. You know, it brings up all the ways in which we're actually related to other people rather than the ways in which we're responsible and on our own. And that, you know, personhood really has been devised and has developed over a long time in such a way as to really atomize us, really isolate us as individuals from each other conceptually. And then in material and practical ways too. But that's not a very good description of how the world works, really. I don't take ownership of my emotions. I. I have to figure out how to deal with the feelings I have in relation to other people, you know, so that was. That's the first thing I did. And I tried to think about, well, what about things besides those intangibles that we are supposed to take ownership of? Then we can change our language about, and we can encourage others to change their language about. And I think that will change our relationship with each other and with our work and with our health and all of those things. If we don't think of those as things we have to own, I think those changes are things we really can undertake and make. But then there are things that we do own, and you're not going to get away from that. There's no escaping the economy that we have except through death, I think. So changing our relationships with the things we do own and changing our relationships with each other with regard to owning of things, that's a harder thing. But I do try to grapple with that some in that chapter on ownership, talking about, looking at some of the history of ways in which people have resisted trying to own things. I talk about St. Francis and the ownership of land and buildings and things like that. The Franciscans tried for quite some time not to own anything. And I talk about what would it have been like to be. To have inherited people as one's own slaves? What would you do if you inherited people? A horrible situation where you don't want to own somebody, but you don't want to just give them away or something either, because then somebody else will just own them. So how do you manage your relationships in context in which you are more or less already owning something? What do you do and how do you sort that out? And that's messy. There's not a simple answer at all to that. But I did try to. I did those thought experiments with the slavery issue, and then I started reading some indigenous North American literature on ownership. The people who resisted longest being persons in our lineage, are various indigenous American groups. They did not want to own land. They did not want to own animals. Not all of them. Some of them did. But. But many of them resisted and they paid a huge price for it. But. But there are still traditions there, and they still. Some of them still have traditions in which they can. Of the world as not owned and as them and of themselves as not owners, which is not to be a person in that particular Lockean lineage that very troubled, very troubling Lockean lineage. So we have a lot to learn, I think, from those traditions and those people.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah. And you've also started to sketch this, that relationality isn't supported by individuation into persons, that it actually is inimical to relationality. But I think you also do a really nice job of acknowledging that we can also experience a gap that is something like individuation, that we experience ourselves as individuals. But you seek a lot of. I think you do a lot of work there to make that strange to us, what our individuation really consistent. And so will you talk a bit about what we might be, if not individual persons? Right. But still individuated. That we still might be something meaningfully individuated?

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yes. I can't. And maybe this is just my own limitations. I cannot get past the notion that I'm somehow not the rest of the world. You know, I. I just can't accept the oneness of all things. I know some people seem to be able to do that. I can understand how interconnected various beings are and interdependent, and I can understand myself that way. But I'm still. I'm still here and you're still there. And, you know, the dog's still in the other room, and there's a difference. And I think that. I think. I think it's a mistake to jump from radical individualism with all its problems straight into something more like radical monism than, you know, we're all somehow one. We're all united. Because I think that covers over difference and diversity and diversification, the wonderful, I think, awesome processes of. Of differencing that go on all the time all around us and that sustain us. But I don't know how, you know, I don't have any metaphysical language for that. And I think our metaphysical tradition philosophically has done us terrible disservice and left us with very little way to talk about differing and differences without turning it into something that is. Is radically individuating. But so I just explore. It's the best I can do. I can't. I don't have a, you know, a cosmology to propose. Even if I were not a bit suspicious of cosmologies. I just don't. I don't know quite how to think of it. But I again drew in the book some on some indigenous North American traditions, trying to think about the points. I very much like Leanne Simpson's work and I like what she has to say, for example, about the point at which one group's hunting ground abuts another group's hunting ground and how there's not a boundary there, there's not a line, but there's still a difference. And that there's a certain amount of overlapping or independent interpenetrating. And that is the point at which differences emerge and in some ways are nurtured. She talks about the. How does she put it? Do you remember how she puts it? Something about our diplomatic traditions, but also our cultural traditions are heightened at those points that there's lots of ritual surrounding the edges of the grounds as they come together. I like trying to think about things in that way. I think that people like Simpson are important leaders or can be for many of us who don't have that indigenous heritage ourselves. Not that we can be them, but that wouldn't be in the spirit of differing anyway. But we can certainly learn from people who have had ways of thinking and acting and living together that emphasize difference without insisting on boundary and separation. So, yeah, so it's exploratory. I use some. As you know, I use some stuff that I read in some science books. I love science books about. About how nervous systems came to be. Perhaps these are speculative evolutionary theories, right? How it is that that early sea creatures might have begun to have locomotion and not just like, be buffeted around by the. By the currents and swallow whatever came upon Them, Right. It's for nourishment, but rather begin to actually move towards sources of food or light or whatever it was that they might require. And how the process of motility, of developing motility, also must have developed some ability to sense difference. So the development of the nervous system, of course, as an integrated system in a motile organism, has to be able to tell the difference between its own body and body parts and things that are not its body parts in order to change direction when it runs into something or stuff like that. So there's some stuff in science studies about, about how it may be that our bodies first developed our bodies way before they were human or any mammals or anything. How bodies may have developed sense of. Of difference. I won't say self and other, I'm not sure about that, but the sense of difference that enabled things like movement and eventually enabled things like deliberate behaviors. So I, I just looked for things in these last few chapters. I just looked for things in other traditions that were close enough to mine that I could at least begin to try to understand them. And in science and wherever I could find it, that would just spark my imagination. How can I think of not being all the same and yet somehow not being radically separate? So I don't have answers, but it's fun exploring.

[Sarah Tyson]

Well, and you give us a framework, I think, in the last chapter and ethos of active belonging, or maybe that is like a framework of exploration or experimentation or. Yeah.

[Liddell McWhorter]

I don't know how strong that framework is, but I did try. I mean, it is provisional, but yeah, what I'm trying to think is that instead of. And this is really a way of overcoming the notion of ownership too. This is all part of that project. Instead of that things belong to me, that I belong. I belong to a community, I belong to an ecosystem. I belong to a nation, you know, all kinds of things. And those, those belongings to. Are not claims of ownership and obligation, but they are connection, claims of connection. And we belong to things we hate sometimes or things that don't want us, communities that hate us. We sometimes belong to communities that hate us, but that does not mean we don't belong. The belonging is first. That's what I'm striving to think with anyway. The belonging is, is, Is real. We really do belong. We belong together, we belong here, we belong on this planet. And then I, I say, so how could we act like we belong? What would it be to. What would it be to act like I belong to this ecosystem? What would it be to act like I belong to this community. I belong to this. To this country. I belong to this time, this culture, whatever we may say. How do I act like I belong and how do I recognize the belonging of the others? Right. And that doesn't give you very hard, secure answers about how to live, but it is about how to live and not just about how to own your access in person, because you don't. You don't own. You belong. That. Yeah. Is that a clear enough account of what I say? I mean, it's very tentative in that last chapter, and I feel inadequate to. To push it much farther. I don't know where to go beyond that right now.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah, I mean, I think that part of what you don't want to do is prescribe, but what you call fomet, creative experimentation make that more possible for us. Well, so what are you working on now?

[Liddell McWhorter]

I've been trying to sort out the notion of biopower in an article that I'm working on. And this is going back to Foucault. Interpretation of Foucault's work, largely, not so much. Not as speculative or as sweeping as the book is, but just I suspect that in the current political situation, and I mean globally, but particularly in the US Right now, there are ways in which regimes of power are breaking down. And biopower, as you know, as a Foucault scholar, you know that we're talking about, when we say biopower, we're talking about certain kind combinations of large regimes of normalization, disciplinary normalization, and population management and so on, which have focused on the cultivation of certain aspects of living beings and the suppression of certain aspects of living beings to cultivate life in ways that are typically beneficial to the powerful. And so biopower has been around, depending on how you define it, for 100 years or whatever. And it's sort of been. A lot of people have sort of seen it as the enemy. My suspicion is that it is collapsing in many areas. Not altogether, because it's not one thing and it's not one system, but there are places in which biopolitical regimes are in crisis and collapsing, and particularly in the United States. And we could say, well, that's great, there goes the enemy. But the problem is that population management also includes things like public health. And when we think about normalizing disciplinary regimes, we are also talking about our education system. And, you know, we don't have. If those systems collapse or become so dysfunctional that they aren't doing much of anything that's any good, we're in deep trouble. So. But I think that may be happening. And as I see that beginning to happen, I'm asking myself, and I think it's because certain aspects of neoliberalism are collapsing as well. And not that neoliberalism and biopower are the same thing, not at all. But I do think that neoliberalism over the last 40 years has adopted lots of the mechanisms of biopower, and it has become in some ways very dependent on those and deployed them and in some ways has undermined some of them, particularly the disciplinary regimes. So I'm just trying to sort out in this paper what. What's happening is. Does it make sense to. To see biopower? The concept from Foucault has been around about years. I think it's a useful concept, very useful. It has been for analyzing things that we've seen in the last 50 years and before, and it will be useful in the future for understanding those things in the past. But I'm not sure it's going to be useful for understanding some of the things that are starting to take shape in the wake of the collapse of certain kinds of biopolitical regimes. That's what I'm working on. It doesn't sound nearly as exciting as personhood or beyond personhood, does it?

[Sarah Tyson]

I mean, it feels very timely.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yeah. Timely is kind of scary right now, though.

[Sarah Tyson]

It's terrifying.

[Liddell McWhorter]

Yeah.

[Sarah Tyson]

Yeah. Well, Liddell McWhorter, thank you so much for this conversation.

[Liddell McWhorter]

You're very welcome. Thank you.