Globalization touches the core of what it means to be human. The proliferation of discourses on human rights after the end of the cold war indicates that globalization raises the deepest anxieties about the continuing preservation of our humanity. Because the humanities does not take the humanity of the human being as a given but sets as its basic task the inquiry of how humanity is constituted, it can help us assess whether the vicissitudes of globalization compel a radical rethinking of what it means to be human. If social-scientific solutions to the problems of globalization have always precomprehended an idea of humanity as the bearer of dignity, freedom, sociability, and culture as the power of transcending contingent limitations, and therefore the idea of humanity as an ideal project that needs to be actualized, the task and challenge of the humanities today may be to question this precomprehension of the human and even, somewhat perversely, to give it up.