The subject of this book is the question of humanitarianism which has been revived by the recent debate on humanitarian action but has been on the agenda for at least two centuries. Our aim is first of all to clarify this debate by taking up the discussions and models which accompanied the introduction of the argument of pity into politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the purposes of this return to the past is to show that the argument between those in favour of humanitarian altruism and those who deny its possibility was fixed when political theory began to be concerned with what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘politics of pity’.

We are not attempting to show that there is nothing new under the sun however. To the contrary, it seems to us that over the last twenty years the development of a number of non-governmental organisations involved in humanitarian action throughout the world, and the importance and significance this movement is in the process of acquiring, is something new. What is more, this nascent humanitarian movement lies at the heart of two tensions within today's Western societies.

The first of these tensions is between an abstract universalism and a narrow communitarianism.