Recent Works on Dignity and Human Rights: A Road Not Taken Michael Goodhart Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times. By Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. 288p. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. Human Rights as Social Construction. Benjamin Gregg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 272p. $99.00 cloth, $27.99 paper. Human Dignity. By George Kateb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 256p. $22.95. Dignity: Its History and Meaning. By Michael Rosen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 200p. $21.95. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics. By Kathryn Sikkink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 352p. $27.95 cloth, $25.62 paper. Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship. By Karen Zivi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 176p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. T oday the concepts of human rights and human dignity have become “conjoined twins.” 1 Dignity is ubiquitous, invoked in discussions of everything from the ethics of stem cell research to dwarf tossing (a near obsession among writers on this topic) and the pro- democracy demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Prominent philosophers and political theorists—including Ronald Dworkin, Jeremy Waldron, James Griffin, Jürgen Habermas, and Rainer Forst—have recently used human dignity to ground or expound upon their preferred philosophical conceptions of human rights. If nothing else, these are good times for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose 1486 “Oration on the Dignity of Man” is trending. While this surge of interest in human dignity is noteworthy in itself, I shall not attempt to trace its origins or to provide an overview of the concept’s various contemporary uses. 2 Instead, I want to consider what recent works on dignity reveal about the study of human rights within our discipline. When I began my graduate studies nearly 20 years ago, human rights were still in the margins of political science; today they have become central to it. Within political theory, human rights figure prominently in debates on justice, democracy, and accountability; in world and comparative politics, rights are studied by scholars working on diverse topics, including security, development, political economy, international law and organization, social movements, norm diffusion, and comparative democratization. Only the subfield of American politics remains largely indifferent to human rights. Despite this mainstreaming of human rights within political science, theoretical and empirical research on the subject remains stubbornly segregated. Empiricists typi- cally treat the normative importance of rights as self- evident, while normative scholars typically neglect the boisterous political life of rights in their search for the elusive justification or moral foundation that they remain persuaded are lacking. This division is outmoded and counterproductive: The politics of human rights might well hold clues to their appeal and legitimacy, providing an alternative route for apprehending their normative char- acter; likewise, their normative character seems indispens- able for making sense of the politics and institutions they enliven. Dignity seems to illustrate this point vividly. Not only is it a hot topic in political theory—five of the six volumes under review here are written by theorists—but recent events have thrust it to the forefront of today’s politics. To name just a few examples: Dignity has been frequently invoked in the Arab uprisings, by peasant and indigenous movements from various parts of the globe, and in antiausterity politics in Europe (think of Spain’s tellingly Michael Goodhard is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh (goodhart@pitt.edu). 846 Perspectives on Politics doi:10.1017/S1537592714002175 © American Political Science Association 2014 Review Essay