The Right to have Rights as a Response to the Decline Of Human Dignity and the Nation-State (original) (raw)
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Continental Philosophy Review, 2010
Much in the same way that Nietzsche's sociohistorical context motivated his concern with articulating a life-affirming response to the problem of nihilism, so Hannah Arendt, writing in the wake of the destruction wrought by World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust, sought ways of making sense of and affirming life within a post-totalitarian world. Again, as is the case with Nietzsche following the death of God, Arendt's task was complicated by the fact that, as she argues, unprecedented events had rendered modern political, legal, and moral concepts, categories, and principles not only useless but also potentially harmful. Prominent among such concepts is that of ''the human'' which, according to Arendt, presents a special case. Rather than destroying this concept from without, totalitarianism instead revealed and pushed to the breaking point its existing inherent contradictions. Arendt makes clear that rather than promoting the dignity of all persons, notions of a given humanness as expressed in the Rights of Man in fact played a key role in undermining it: totalitarian regimes had only to show that certain groups of people were not fully human (or not properly human at all), and were therefore unworthy of such rights and the protections they afforded. Given that human rights were effectively grounded in a fiction, they completely broke down when states attempted to put them into practice. The question therefore emerges not only as to how, but more fundamentally whether, the protections ''human rights'' are intended to afford can be secured and implemented in any kind of meaningful way in a post-totalitarian world. And even if they can be, does it make sense to refer to them as ''human rights''? If not, how can they be conceptualized in ways that mediate against both oppression and domination and also promote human freedom? These are some of the key issues and questions that Peg Birmingham takes up in her book, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Birmingham rejects claims that, on the one hand, Arendt's notion of a basic ''right to have rights'' ultimately fails because it lacks adequate normative foundations and that, on the other hand, Arendt in fact jettisoned the notion of human rights altogether-or, at least, that she ought to have done so. Instead, Birmingham argues that Arendt took it upon herself to reconceptualize the right to have rights in ways that rendered such a notion politically efficacious in a world devoid of a notion of universal, given humanness. Indeed, according to Birmingham, ''Arendt's entire work can be read as an attempt to work out theoretically this fundamental right to have rights'' (1). Birmingham ultimately sees Arendt articulating what might be referred to as ''human rights without the Human.'' 1 From her perspective, insofar as the concept of the human cannot provide a basis for the right to have rights, Arendt dispenses with it in favor of a notion of a common, shared humanity. Moreover, her notion of humanity is not grounded in reason or autonomy, as is the case with the modern concept of the human-or even in ''nature, history, or god''-but rather in the ''archaic and unpredictable event of natality'' (3). Birmingham's own analysis, then, is dedicated to elucidating Arendt's notions of natality and humanity and considering how the latter might function as an ontological basis for common responsibility and the right to have rights. Her first chapter provides an overview of natality as Arendt conceives of it; Chapters Two and Three focus, respectively, on
Taiwan Democracy Quarterly (臺灣民主季刊), 2024
This paper interprets Hannah Arendt's concept of the right to have rights (RthRs) as the collective right of a people, arguing that it is a right to build relationships equally and freely with other peoples around the world. The paper first reviews the existing literature on the concept and argue against Seyla Benhabib's reading of it. By reading and interpreting Arendt's text, I contend that the RthRs is (1) the right to politics, (2) the power of a people, which I refer to the power of a "polity" in Arendt's sense, and (3) the people's power to political actions. Such a reading attempts to explore the meaning of the RthRs as what I called the collective right of a people, which refers to neither declaration of sovereign independence nor self-determination (typically in regard to the statute of the United Nations) but to equal and free collective action, that is, to act as who we are among other peoples (including but not limited to existing sovereign states) around the world. The paper finally explicates why such a reading of the RthRs matters to global politics today and concludes my interpretation of Arendt's concept of the RthRs.
CITIZEN OF THE POLIS AND CITIZEN OF THE WORLD: HANNAH ARENDT ON HUMAN AND CIVIC RIGHTS
Letizia Konderak, 2020
Arendt's reflections on the critical issues of Human Rights still hold relevance after seventy years: the news reports the baffling condition of immigrants, refugees, sans papier and people trying to cross borders towards a better life daily. These people are still forced to live outside the law as the displaced persons have been since the two World wars. Arendt's claim on the emptiness of human rights-which are guaranteed only when they are citizens' rights-has been discussed by French philosophers like Rancière and Balibar. These philosophers affirms the effectiveness of human rights for political action: Rancière states that human rights open the political space for the inclusion of the excluded; for Balibar human rights are both extensively and intensively universal, that is, they exclude exclusion. Contrastingly, the Italian jurist Agamben radicalizes Arendt's thesis: human rights are the means for an original violence towards men, because their exclusive inclusion pins them to bare life. This paper aims to discuss these reading on the matter of human rights, focusing on Arendt's constitutional politics. Her discussion on the birth of the United States reveals that she considered the horizontal and vertical multiplication of power institutions as the core solution against both political exclusion and institutional weakening. Universal institutions do not exclude local ones, but they strengthen each other. Arendt's idea offers a way to rethink humanity and universal inclusion, through concrete institutions which make rights effective.
Autonomy of the Political and Human Rights in Hannah Arendt’s Political Theory
Autonomy is the main trait of the political domain in Arendt’s political theory. It regards its independence from other domains, such as the social and the economic one, and the fact that it is an end in itself and not a mere mean to attain other goals. We will examine the consequences that this conception has on the issue of human rights, knowing that Arendt, on the one hand, has reduced them to a single right, which is not itself political, the right to belong to a community and that on the other hand, human rights have an essential place in a theory of democracy. Therefore, there is a break between Arendt’s theory and democratic theory that is essential to the understanding of both the status of the political as a separate domain and the status of human rights as a central question for any democracy.
Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Rancière's Critique of Hannah Arendt
socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk
In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the ‘right to have rights’ as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancie`re’s response to Arendt’s aporetic account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancie`re, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoe ̈) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoe ̈ and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancie`re ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancie`re’s approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life.
We locate Arendt's and Shklar's writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new 'maieutic' discourse of 're-enlightenment' in the 'age of the crisis of man'. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt's The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar's After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2023
If the instance of human rights cannot ensure the protection of the rightless, as Arendt famously claimed, how can the rightless struggle for freedom and equality? In this essay, I attempt to answer this question by reconsidering Arendt's influential critique of human rights in light of the two polar responses it evoked from contemporary French philosophers Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar. Rancière, who objects to Arendt's delimiting of the political, finds her argument excluding and dangerous. Balibar, on the other hand, believes that it conveys an immense potential for politics to come, as it points to the dialectical political truth of equaliberty. In the following, I show the problematics of Rancière's ingenious formulation of rights, and the answer Balibar's original interpretation of Arendt's thought might suggest in response. I contend that working through Rancière's critique of Arendt's argument and Balibar's affirmation of it not only highlights the merits of her critical account but also points to the fundamental relation between Arendt's work on rights and her later discussions of the human condition of non-sovereignty and the power of promises. I believe that such a reading can contribute to our interpretation of Arendt, and pave new routes of action for non-citizens (such as refugees, stateless persons and subjects of military occupation), who cannot employ the authorities' strength for their protection.