Sarah Bakewell’s new book includes an anecdote about two of the intellectual creators of our modern world, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. When Marx read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, he was thrilled; here was a materialist account of human development and a kind of hard-scientific counterpart to his own theory of class struggle. When he published the first volume of Das Kapital, he sent a copy to Darwin, who wrote Marx a nice thank-you note. The book remained on Darwin’s bookshelves, however, its pages uncut and unread.

Bakewell does not comment on this story, but it encapsulates some of the limitations of her book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, a popular history and celebration of the tradition. It does not mean to examine humanism very critically or raise issues that might divide humanists from each other, but to reacquaint the reader with a long and enduring strand in Western intellectual life and highlight the contributions it still makes today.

The book has been attracting positive reviews—“deft,” “skillful” (The Guardian), “lively” (New York Times), “dazzling” (Los Angeles Book Review), “epic, spine-tingling” (The Telegraph)—not to mention an admiring profile of the author herself in the Times. I detect three reasons why. First, because Bakewell is an award-winning scholar and writer, acclaimed for her books on Montaigne and the French Existentialists. Second, because so-called secular humanism is under attack from the extreme right, who are using every means at their disposal, in countries all round the world, to dissolve the boundaries between religion and the state and weaponize the nebulous idea of “tradition” to roll back human rights for women, people of color, and sexual and gender minorities. Third and most importantly, because anyone who identifies as a progressive or liberal, or even as a Marxist or an anarchist, needs to understand humanism, its strengths and its weaknesses: because humanism is in our DNA.

Humanism dates from the early Italian Renaissance of Petrarch and Dante—but it has never been difficult to define. According to the 2003 third Humanist Manifesto, “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” “A humanist philosopher,” Bakewell tells us, “puts the whole living person at the center of things, rather than deconstructing that person into systems of words, signs, or abstract principles.” The individual “is kept at the top of the list of concerns, not subordinated to some grander concept or ideal.” The three watchwords, Bakewell argues, are free thinking, inquiry, and hope.

Unless you belong to the religious right, in the US, the EU, Afghanistan, or anywhere else, humanism by this definition is hard to disagree with. Scholarship, science, and the arts all presumably affirm the dignity of the individual person and the ability of humans, collectively, to understand their world and improve it. Whole branches of science—modern medicine, anthropology, sociology, ethology, to name a few—could not exist if their practitioners did not have some commitment to these beliefs. There is no doubt, either, that individuals who fit the general definition of humanist have suffered for their convictions: the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, author of the Oration on the Dignity of Man, who was poisoned at age 31 by the supposedly enlightened Medici rulers of Florence; or Galileo and other scientists whose work ran afoul of religious orthodoxy; or Mashal Khan, a Pakistani student who, Bakewell relates, was beaten to death by fellow students in 2017 for posting on social media as “The Humanist.”

Bakewell takes us on a survey of humanism’s greatest hitmakers, from Pico to Erasmus to Voltaire to Bertrand Russell to Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Nor are her heroes all white males; she locates Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston in the humanist tradition as well. All good. But after a while, the story seems to stop developing. The scientific revolution adds empirical weight to humanism, and non-Europeans start to contribute to the tradition, but the core philosophy remains essentially the same. As I pushed on through Humanly Possible, the story started to feel mushy feel: a bit transparent, a bit sentimental, a bit too settled.

Is Bakewell’s cherished tradition just apple pie for liberals? “Ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity”—the phrase leaves a catch in the throat, but is that all there is to it? Or, to put it another way, if that is all there is, then who is not a humanist, aside from an out-and-out reactionary?

Picking apart the choices the author makes in a survey like Humanly Possible is never entirely fair; trying to compress a 700-odd-year tradition into a single volume necessitates leaving a few names out. But the choices Bakewell makes, and some aspects of their lives, are revealing. The story of humanism wouldn’t be complete without Voltaire, who Thomas Paine praised for his “irresistible propensity” to expose folly. But Bakewell fails to mention that Voltaire and his fellow French philosophes had no problem with autocracy. Several of them accepted the patronage of the despots Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, and one of Voltaire’s most celebrated works, in his day and for many years after, was his monumental history of Louis XIV’s reign, which credited the bigoted, blood-spattered Sun King with presiding over the greatest age in the history of humanity.

Many later humanists, by contrast, were—and are—against autocracy. Does that mean humanism has nothing to say either way about autocracy and despotism? Or that Votaire, who appears on the cover of Bakewell’s book, does not really qualify as a humanist?

Bakewell’s choices become more perplexing as the story moves closer to our own time. Karl Marx would seem like an exemplary humanist. Despite his authoritarian tendencies, he was an atheist who believed fundamentally in humans’ ability to remake themselves and their environment for the better, and his thought has helped make the modern world more secular and scientifically oriented. Yet Bakewell mentions him only twice aside from the anecdote about his correspondence with Darwin, and only in passing. 

She does devote several paragraphs to the terror and atrocities committed by Marx’s disciples, specifically Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. She does not, however, mention the atrocities committed by the US and its allies in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and numerous Latin American countries. Do the Enlightenment roots of the American philosophy of government excuse the Founders from the crimes of their successors (and their own)?

Another major figure left out of Bakewell’s account is W.E.B. Du Bois. Arguably the greatest African American scholar and activist of his time, it is difficult to understand why Douglass and Hurston would merit major attention in Humanly Possible but Du Bois not a single mention. This despite the fact that he was a pioneer of African American humanist thought, a movement that Bakewell mentions in passing toward the end of her book, a rationalist who summed up his views as follows: “I assumed that human beings could alter and redirect the course of events so as to better human conditions” (see Christopher Cameron’s recent paper, “W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Humanism,” in the collection Forging Freedom in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory).

The difference may be that unlike Douglass and Hurston, Du Bois was a Communist: a figure whose humanism was activated by a political philosophy that remains alive and controversial. The same goes for another group of intellectuals who Bakewell completely overlooks: the anarchists. Yet their role in the development of humanist thought in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was critical. Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) was a major contribution to the debate over Darwin’s work, arguing that cooperation and collectivity were just as important to human evolution as competition. 

Mikhail Bakunin’s 1883 essay, “God and the State,” is a landmark in the freethinking tradition that Bakewell celebrates. “On behalf of human liberty, dignity and prosperity,” Bakunin declared, “we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth.” Succeeding generations of anarchists have embraced the slogan, “No gods, no masters”: a quintessential humanist credo that fails to find its way into Bakewell’s book. 

It is not just the left she neglects to consider. Is there such thing as a conservative humanist? Certainly, there have been; H.L. Mencken, the writer, cultural critic, and one of the greatest American freethinkers, comes to mind, as do Leo Strauss, the German-American classicist and intellectual hero of the neoconservatives, and Allan Bloom, author of the bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. What makes them humanists? They were atheists, they were believers in thought and scholarship as fundamental human activities, and their focus above all was human happiness and virtue. Bloom was concerned in part that students were no longer reading some of the very writers who began the humanist tradition.

All three—Mencken, Strauss, and Bloom—were Eurocentrists and elitists who looked down on popular culture and could not see much outside of a cobbled-together “Great Books” tradition (made up almost entirely of works by white males) that was worth serious study. There’s no danger in asserting that if they were alive today, they would be campaigning with all their might against so-called wokeism. And all three tended to have a less optimistic view of human nature than did the figures Bakewell celebrates. But that does not disqualify them as humanists; it only places them at one end of a spectrum within the humanist tradition, the existence of which Bakewell never acknowledges in her book.

The common denominator that Du Bois and Bakunin share with Mencken and Bloom is that they were all overtly political individuals who did not see their humanism as separate from their political convictions. This points up a problem not just with Bakewell’s book but with humanism itself. She goes to great lengths to avoid discussing divisive figures, or bringing up her heroes’ less virtuous sides. (Like many people on both the right and the left in his day, Bertrand Russell accepted aspects of eugenics as legitimate science; he once advocated forced sterilization of “mental defectives.”) This is understandable in a book that attempts to show the continuities in humanism over the centuries and to appeal to a broad audience. But, coming from such a prominent representative as Bakewell, it also suggests a tendency for humanism to sidestep politics and avoid nasty but necessary fights that might lose it some adherents but enable it to better define itself. “Human rights” is a core idea of humanism, and a liberating one, but the question remains whether it too is an evasion of politics, an attempt to put such contentious issues as legal and economic equality, race, and gender beyond the realm of discussion. Humanism, as it emerges in Bakewell’s book, is a storehouse of worthy ideals and aspirations, but it does not provide a practical roadmap to human liberation, let alone revolution. 

While the latent politics of humanism goes unaddressed in Humanly Possible, science is curiously missing in the last couple of hundred pages of the book. Much of the tradition is built on a respect for and embrace of science: that is, on observation and experiment. Darwin and Thomas Huxley are two of Bakewell’s pivotal 19^th century figures. In the succeeding century, however, what defines the human—particularly the human mind and consciousness—became much more problematic. 

Physicists like Ernst Mach and Werner Heisenberg cast doubt on the dividing line between the thing or object, and our observation or knowledge of it. The findings of the new subatomic physics called into question the definition of the “I” itself. Is there a distinct, individual I, or just a constantly shifting and expanding field? What if the distinction been the I and the “non-I” is contingent, something that can be suspended during mystical or religious experiences: experiences that humans, through the centuries, have consciously pursued? The logician Kurt Gödel argued that, given the laws of relativity, “now” cannot exist, undermining one of the most basic ways we experience reality as individuals. 

These are just a few of the questions that scientists and philosophers have been wrestling with in the 100-plus years since Einstein and his colleagues upset the conventions of Newtonian science. They call into question the relationship between the mind, and the reality it creates, and the “real” physical world. Is the mind part of a larger intelligence in the universe? This reopens an issue that another great humanist influencer who Bakewell does not mention, René Descartes, had presumably settled nearly 400 years earlier with his assertion of the mind-body distinction. 

The new physics suggests that Descartes’s distinction can no longer be taken for granted, and it has led some philosophers of science to explore Indian or Vedic philosophy, which has always been less wedded to the idea of the individual. Humanism can be thought of as a celebration of the Cartesian mind. But would it do humanism any harm to entertain other—perhaps less Eurocentric—ways of thinking about the mind, and the individual? Bakewell seems to find the prospect fearful. Michel Foucault “thought the Enlightenment had created a Man that was now ready for obliteration,” she writes, referring to the French philosopher’s 1966 study, The Order of Things. “Now the hub was to be structures and processes—still human, but treated as if they were more important than the actual humans who lived with them.” 

This is quite an accusation, and it raises a further question: Is humanism outmoded? Is it no longer capable of absorbing the latest advances in our understanding of the physical world and incorporating them into a satisfying understanding of ourselves? 

Bakewell fails to engage directly with Foucault’s challenge, but indirectly, she gives us one possible way to think about it. She quotes the anti-colonialist political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s last work, The Wretched of the Earth: “That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.”

But in the same book, Fanon urged, “Let us reconsider the question of … the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connexions must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be re-humanized.” 

“What,” she asks with some satisfaction, “could be more humanist than that?” She compliments thinkers like Foucault and Fanon for “highlighting questions that European humanists had been inclined to think too little about, especially racism, social exclusion, colonialism, and cultural difference.” But these are nearly the last words in her book on the tension between humanism and the parts of humanity it excluded for so long; she fails to see a more fundamental challenge in these “questions,” and so she fails to give us a clear way to understand our relationship with the tradition today.

The weakness of humanism has always been that it places itself a little outside and above the society itself: even though the society, as much as the individual, is its true field of study. The 19^th century historian Jakob Burckhardt considered the two exemplary Renaissance figures Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battisti Albert to be “universal men,” Bakewell tells us, “who could take on any form and achieve almost anything in a fluid, constantly changing society.” 

Fanon’s plea for greater connection between the “cerebral mass of all humanity” contains an echo of this ideal, but without the elitist tinge. If humanism is to survive, it needs to remake itself as a multicultural, multi-gender affair, able not only to interrogate its past but to integrate different forms of learning and understanding from a variety of different cultures. Hopefully it will succeed, since the despotisms of our time increasingly are against learning, science, and any sort of inclusive, collective culture. Doing so will be a political act: something humanism will have to get accustomed to embracing.

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