Two Problems with Personhood: Expanding the Circle and Impoverishing the Person

Laurie Anderson, Habeas Corpus (2015), Park Avenue Armoury (New York, NY). Photo by James Ewing.

Until the 1990s, the term “personhood”—the quality or condition of being an individual person—appeared rarely, sometimes in bioethics or moral and religious philosophy, occasionally in legal scholarship. But, over the last twenty-five years, the concept has seeped into the political, legal, and cultural realms, generating confusion, fascination, and unease. Personhood has become essential to debates about providing corporations human privileges, releasing animals from zoos, limiting access to abortion, permitting trees the standing to sue, and giving algorithms free speech protections. For many, these movements are variously disturbing or hopeful. Controversies about each of them have been examined with journalistic vigor and scholarly care. But what are the consequences of this trend of expanding the circle of personhood? What happens when we turn more things, ideas, and entities into persons? 

To begin to answer these questions we must recognize something unexpected. Our new forms of personhood emerged out of, and are variations on, an old version of legal “fictional” personhood: the corporate one. Starting in the nineteenth century, law sought to tackle the representation and apportionment of collective thoughts and actions at scale, in societies and commercial firms that were becoming unwieldy. Anglo-American legal systems developed corporate personhood to project large business entities on the model of rationally contracting individuals, and perversely did so, in the United States, with constitutional amendments intended to protect formerly enslaved people. The US Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision, holding that corporations may exercise their free speech rights as persons by “speaking” with campaign donations, is merely a late installment of this story.

For better and sometimes worse, today’s multifaceted personhood movement is a complex culmination of those legal and business aims that foregrounded rights over responsibilities, individual freedoms over collective obligations. To put it a little differently, other, nonhuman entities are permitted, in law, to amass and exercise rights without having anything much in the way of duties, because (like corporate persons) they do not have the capacity to ought to do something. This lack of duties emerges as a central theme as we begin to grasp the extent to which our personhood is constituted by our obligations. And, as distinctive and as politically divergent as contemporary personhood movements might seem, they all began with the corporate person.

An insight by philosopher and political activist Simone Weil can guide us. In the 1940s, in Gravity and Grace, Weil wrote that collective thought was a dangerous conundrum wherever we might find it. Because “collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines . . .). Hence the paradox: it is the thing which thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.” Collective thought’s tantalizing hope, and its actual impossibility, generates a paradox of people reduced to and equated with things. Legal personhood is another symptom of this paradox, a way to make palpable the collective thought of corporations, and the intentions and judgments of beings that either cannot express their intentions in language (nonhuman animals, fetuses), or lack them to begin with (the environment, robots, and AI). Law makes meaning by reformulating “people” into “legal persons,” and into another, thing-like form.

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What sorts of premises does this expansion of personhood need? There are several key components, but here are the first two. The most basic thesis is as follows:

Thesis 1: The expanding personhood model requires the eighteenth-century notion of perfect equality, in contrast to the status-based model of older regimes founded in Roman law.

It is an obvious point but still needs to be stated: The notion of expansive personhood cannot begin without this initial, equalizing move. Expansive personhood needs the concept of equality because, without it, there will be no secure way to bring in all individuals under its protections. Otherwise, it always will be possible to make, invent, or legitimate what the Rights of Man calls “social distinctions” between individuals of different backgrounds or social classes—or between species or kinds.

Almost immediately, the force of this point was deployed on both sides of the expansiveness debate. Think of Mary Wollstonecraft’s point, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): “Let women share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man.” It is not woman’s innately different being that holds her back but her lower social status and lack of rights, argues Wollstonecraft, and so she will “grow more perfect when emancipated.” As philosopher Peter Singer notes, that same basic logic was used the same year to produce a parody of not just women’s asserted rights, but of the assertion of rights belonging to animals, more generally. Thomas Taylor’s anonymously published A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), mocks “the equality of all things.” Anything, Taylor notes, is “of inestimable value, and intrinsically equal to a thing of the least magnitude and worth.” Wollstonecraft sees women’s rights and full flourishing as the only way for society to realize its potential, to continue “the progress of knowledge, because truth must be common to all.” Taylor, in contrast, predicts the dangers both to his patriarchal, elevated position, and to society more generally, destroying the necessary differences that sustain the status quo. “Treatises on the rights of vegetables and minerals” are sure to follow so that “the doctrine of perfect equality will become universal,” and “dominion of every kind be exiled from the face of the earth.” All distinctions between humans and nonhumans will be erased, and vegetables will rule, somehow, as ferociously as men.

Taylor’s mockery of utopian “perfect equality” gestures at an aspect of rights discourse that ripens into a real concern by the mid-twentieth century.

Thesis 2: Expansive personhood, paradoxically, requires an impoverished notion of personhood. 

That is, the expanding circle of personhood logically entails a radically reductive, almost empty account of the person (without the Christian soul, at the very least), one who is also missing the ascriptions of conventions and status that might stitch different individuals into a coherent social fabric. Typically, this depleted version of personhood equates with rudimentary human rights.

Versions of this claim have been recognized by a range of more recent philosophers and critical theorists. Anna Grear, for example, helpfully discusses the “the decontextualisation of law’s person,” which surreptitiously serves “to privilege the interests of identifiable propertied capitalistic elites and their interests.” But personhood is not typically described in these terms, nor has it been treated systematically. Contemporary readers are sometimes led astray because the English word “personhood” is of relatively recent vintage, essentially nonexistent until the 1970s; many languages still do not use such a term. Instead, the term “personality” incorporated both our contemporary idea of individual identity and distinctive characteristics (as in “personality traits”) as well as that of philosophical and legal existence and status (as in “personhood”). This etymology needs to be kept in view when examining mid-twentieth century political theoretical critiques such as Simone Weil’s and Hannah Arendt’s, which typically use or are translated as the term “personality” but, with that word, also incorporate philosophical and legal “personhood.”

For those critical of legal personhood’s dominance, Weil’s essay “Human Personality” (1942–43), is foundational, with its account of the insufficiency of rights as an idea that could possibly capture the entirety of someone’s personhood. “The notion of rights,” she writes, “which was launched into the world in 1789, has proved unable, because of its intrinsic inadequacy, to fulfill the role assigned to it.” For Weil, the idea of the rights-bearing person in the 1789 Rights of Man document is a degrading and inadequate inheritance from Roman law. It fails to capture what is sacred about human beings, an essential quality she describes as what is “impersonal” about them. Rather, the rights-based version of the person aligns with everything economic, collective, and mediocre: “The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity; it has a commercial flavour, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments.” Such economic and legal concepts ultimately rely on force, which is always lurking in the background of the claim of rights, “or else it will be laughed at.” You can see her point when reflecting on Taylor’s Vindication for brutes’ and vegetables’ rights, taken as pure mockery, while Peter Singer’s identical argument, financially supported by the Animal Liberation Front and PETA, and legislatively by various state-sponsored legal safeguards, is received as dead serious. To sum up, Weil deems the exclusive reliance on rights as a dangerous distraction from the real problem: a social drama (coercion into prostitution, for example) is “falsely assimilated” into an economic problem (the right to sell your body product at the best price).

A few decades later, Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), tackles the inadequacy of personhood rights from a different direction, sketching out a story of how the activists of the French Revolution aimed to “tear off . . . the mask of hypocrisy” worn by the insincere role-players in society’s games in order to “liberate the natural man in all men,” giving him his entitled birthright of the Rights of Man. Their aim backfired, however. In the process of “unmasking society” and releasing people from a situation in which rights originate in the body politic, the activists inadvertently tore off that older fiction (from Roman law) of legal personhood. The Rights of Man only was able to make men equal because it leaves everyone, admittedly equally, without what she calls “the protecting mask of a legal personality.”

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt explores what happens when this situation expands and devolves. It is the disastrous history from WWI through the Holocaust, leading to the nation-state’s decline and “the End of the Rights of Man.” Without the notion of a common world in which we all live, with our different legal personalities and statuses, people are forced to live, in a sense, outside the common world altogether. They find themselves “thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation . . . they begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species.” The Holocaust is obviously her target here. Yet also, albeit in an inverted and emergent form, we are already starting to see Arendt warn us about a version of the model of personhood that animal rights activists will seek to promote. It is a model that understands our species-centrism as a kind of racial difference (“mere differentiation”) to be acknowledged and then overcome.

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It is Arendt’s version of this “thrown back” individual—the person legally unmasked, relying only on “natural givenness”—that Giorgio Agamben (via Walter Benjamin) appropriates as the notion of “bare life.” For Agamben, “the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power.” And it is not just happenstance that causes him to note that the first time we see “bare life as the new political subject is . . . the 1679 writ of habeas corpus.” As Agamben puts it, “democracy is born precisely” at the moment when it is an assertion and presentation of a “body” to show (“bare, anonymous life”), rather than a feudal subject or a future notion of citizen. Roberto Esposito makes a similar point. Tracing the rejection of human beings as property from Immanuel Kant, to the French Civil Code (1804), to the current European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, Esposito describes “the paradox” this development inadvertently introduced: “by declaring the body to be a ‘person,’ such prohibitions have the unintended effect of sending it back to the status of res [a legal thing or matter, in contrast to person],” even if the body is understood as a kind of “thing” taken out of the circuit of commerce.

I bring up these challenges to personhood and rights in part because, following Arendt’s and later theorists’ lead, a powerful and important critique of human rights has emerged from the left in political theory in recent decades. A critique from the right had long been familiar (since at least Edmund Burke and Taylor, ranging to contemporary scholars Alasdair MacIntyre and Mary Ann Glendon). But the left’s challenge to human rights has a different aim, whether emerging in Critical Legal and Critical Race Studies or in the progressive and sometimes Marxist-flavored legal history and political theory of Wendy Brown, Jessica Whyte, and Samuel Moyn.

One influential example, Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), makes the case that human rights are a historical project of the neoliberal turn in the 1970s, “widely understood as a moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias.” The triumph of the discourse of human rights reflects the disappointment and failure of other political models, ones that found their authority in the state or nation. Other scholars, including Seyla Benhabib and Ayten Gündoğdu, consider the way actual practices of human rights fail to protect or serve migrants, exiles, and refugees. Here, I simply want to acknowledge both the significance and importance of human rights discourse, as well as the force of critiques pointing out their failures in contemporary practice.

But my aims are different. The legal discourses of expansive personhood often do not address human rights dilemmas at all, but focus on very different entities instead. And we can already start to see that expansive personhood needs another element to at least temporarily fend off these critiques. In essence, that is the strategic move of embracing the inadequacy and hollowness as the entirety of what personhood means. Human personhood is positively equated with, and reduce to, artificial, legal personhood. That is the legal entity known as the corporation.

--Adapted from Lisa Siraganian, The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots (Verso, Feb. 17, 2026)