Wynter's argument is that the figure we call the human has been quietly replaced by one local variant of it, the Western bourgeois subject she names Man, and that this substitution underwrites the hierarchies of the modern world. She traces two inventions. Renaissance humanists remade the sinful creature of Latin Christian theology into a political subject of the state, freeing lay institutions from clerical authority and making natural causality thinkable. Nineteenth century biology then remade that subject again as a purely biological being, selected or not selected by evolution, with race supplying the criterion. Colonial conquest, African enslavement and the racial ordering of the globe are read as the enabling underside of both moves. Present struggles over class, gender, sexuality, incarceration, migration and the sharing out of the earth's resources are gathered as facets of one contest, and the sixties are read as its first open phase. The proposal is a new science of human self-description.