Book Project

The Crisis of Identity and the Case for Human Oneness

Shahrzad Sabet, Forthcoming

Humanity faces a crisis of identity. As the forces of our global age challenge boundaries that define group identities, the secure sense of belonging these identities have traditionally supplied is frustrated or lost, resulting in confusion, insecurity, and conflict. Solutions rooted in national identity, or in other familiar concepts such as liberal democracy, are struggling to resolve the crisis. This book invites readers to consider a different solution: a collective identity based on the oneness of humankind. Through a combination of philosophical and empirical inquiry, Sabet challenges the assumption that a universal human identity must be utopian, homogenizing, or too far removed from the everyday realities of ordinary people. She turns received wisdom on its head and argues that, far from threatening or contradicting the diversity of humankind, an identity rooted in human oneness is uniquely equipped to ensure the fundamental security and flourishing of our other—and otherwise unstable—identities and affiliations. What emerges is a transformative conception of human oneness that permeates all identities and relationships, and finds expression as much in the local and the national as it does in the global and international.