Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

Humanity examines the twentieth century's worst chapters — the trenches of the First World War, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin's gulag, the Nazi camps, Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Rwandan genocide — and asks a single diagnostic question: what made participation possible for ordinary people? The answer was not a theory of evil. It was a taxonomy of erosion. Glover identified the specific mechanisms through which moral restraints loosened: the suppression of the human response by distance and categorization, the diffusion of responsibility across institutional structures, the incremental slide through which each small concession made the next one easier, the tribal loyalty that replaced independent judgment with group identity. The book is arranged not chronologically but analytically: each chapter diagnoses a specific mechanism through case studies that span multiple atrocities. The result is a diagnostic manual that applies to any institutional context where harm is produced at scale by ordinary agents — including, On