Harari's Humanist Wars of Religion: A Critique of Harari's History of Modern Ideologies

Harari's Humanist Wars of Religion is a sharp, meticulously argued critique of the sweeping historical claims made by bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari. Drawing on primary sources and the intellectual history of humanism, Leslie Allan challenges Harari's portrayal of how three rival "sects" of humanism-evolutionary, socialist and liberal-waged what Harari calls the bloodiest wars of religion in history, giving us Auschwitz, the gulags and rapacious capitalism. The result is a provocative and accessible examination of what humanism really is, how it developed and why getting its history right matters for understanding both modern secular thought and the moral foundations of contemporary society.