This essay assesses the resurgent intellectual interest in “dignity,” reviewing recent treatments by four liberal legal and political theorists. The article notes the origins of dignity as “high standing” in Roman, Catholic, and aristocratic discourses, along with its transformation by liberal theorists into a rational tool for accommodating the equality of rights and the hierarchies of virtue for the political ethics of Western societies. The author faults these rehabilitations of “dignity” for minimizing how worldly power in history constitutes ethical prospects and how emphasis upon “dignity” elevates the passivity of moral standing over and against the activity of politics.