Should nonhumans have rights in law and politics?
A Lit Hub
Most Anticipated Book of 2026
Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.
The Problem of Personhood reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand’s Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Lisa Siraganian uncovers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, “she” is transformed into a subject in the law without the corresponding legal duties that protect us from her.
At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.
Advance Praise
“Important reading in the burgeoning age of AI.”
--Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief, Lit Hub
“In this brilliant interdisciplinary study, Lisa Siraganian brings complexity to the conventional ethics and politics of personification. . . . going to the heart of our moral and legal debates.”
--Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
“Siraganian’s book offers not an apology for anthropocentrism, but rather, a clear-sighted compass for thinking through personhood in its newest, broadest, thorniest guises.”
--Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
“[Siraganian's] brilliant The Problem of Personhood argues that the damage done by the idea of the corporate person goes far beyond the difficulties it has created for fair elections. . . . [and] against such expansive personhood she argues for a commitment to solidarity not reducible to the solidarity between legal entities.”
--Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Beauty of the Social Problem
About the Author
Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was the Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, Volume D (1914-1945) (2022).
