A meaningful place in the world: Hannah Arendt on the nature of human rights (original) (raw)
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The Right to have Rights as a Response to the Decline Of Human Dignity and the Nation-State
The following essay explores Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism by emphasizing how her controversial idea of the right to have rights deals with one of the elements that contributed to the rise of totalitarianism, i.e., the decline of the nation-state. I am dividing this essay into three parts for the sake of argumentative clarity and organizational purposes. Part one analyzes the decadence of the nation-state and its connection to the rise of totalitarianism from an Arendtian perspective by highlighting the relation between this political deterioration and the decay of traditional notions of human dignity. Subsequently, part two focuses on the question of the right to have rights as a response to this dual and related decadence of the nation-state and human dignity while exploring Stephanie DeGooyer's interpretative framework of the right to have rights as both an analytical tool and a lost right. Lastly, part three ends with an assessment of whether or not the right to have rights serve an operative function in the fight against totalitarian domination through engaging with Arendt's views on the practicality of this philosophical, political, and existential problem. Consequently, this written analysis is not a mere re-explanation of Arendt's positions but a critical and interpretative exploration of the textual material in question.
The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man
2014
This article investigates Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s critiques of human rights and argues that the two thinkers share a blind spot with regard to the radical potentials of human rights. The problem is that they do not break with two fixed imaginaries which still haunt liberal democracies: (1) the historical essentialist understanding of human rights and (2) nation-states and individuals as the principal loci for political rights, power, and action. Based on the work of Jacques Rancière, Costas Douzinas, and Étienne Balibar this article argues that human rights can be thought of as a constituent part of a radical political praxis and resistance movement. If human rights are thought of as a praxis of “right-ing” (Douzinas) or a “dissensus” (Rancière), which both contest the current “distribution of the sensible,” a new “cosmopolitics of human rights” can be imagined where human rights are conceived as a borderline concept (Balibar).
After the most fundamental assault on humanity and civilization that was realised in the annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany, universalist concepts – an idea of mankind – seemed at stake. Still, in the aftermath of the Second World War the newly created United Nations were eager to set up a framework of international rights and duties with universal validity and proposed legal tools to restore peace and the recognition of human dignity worldwide. One of the most important articulations of these principles was the UN's Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Hannah Arendt's famous exploration of The Perplexities of the Rights of Men forming a core element of her magnus opum Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was an essential comment to the debate of her time. While affirming the universalist notion of humanity and human rights she revealed the unsolved challenges of their enforcement in a world of nation states, highlighting the fragile character of international agreements and their limited reach when faced with sovereign rule. To overcome the limits of the notion of universal human rights as such, she claims a more specific human right: the right to belong, a basic right to citizenship as a way to secure recognition and participation of every human being in a shared world. In my paper, I discuss Arendt's claims in relation to another important Jewish thinker of the time: Hermann Broch. He was equally preoccupied with the possibilities of enforcement of a global human rights regime and tried to come up with very concrete political propositions. Both intellectual's deliberations reveal general reconfigurations of thinking and judging after the Holocaust and highlight their importance within Arendt's and Broch's specific view on historical responsibility and justice. In the first months of 1946, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch, who had to flee after the ' Anschluß' and made it to the United States in 1938, circulated a paper among his friends and colleagues entitled Considerations on the Utopia of an International Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. 1 Here, he drafted concrete propositions for the Human Rights Commission of the newly founded United Nations (UN) headed by Anne Eleanor Roosevelt, which was busy preparing the later ratified Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2 Broch's paper also reached Hannah Arendt, who had just met and closely befriended him. In September that same year, she sent her first draft manuscript of a paper dealing with the same question to him, stating that his thoughts had partly inspired her to write down her own ideas on the topic. In their subsequent letters and publications, we learn how the discussion concerning the best
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.
Jean-Paul Jacqué, Florence Benoît-Rohmer, Panagiotis Grigoriou, and Maria Daniella Marouda (Eds.) Écrits sur la communauté internationale: enjeux juridiques, politiques et diplomatiques/On the International Community: Legal, Political, Diplomatic Issues. Liber Amicorum Stelios Perrakis, 2017
In the Face a Right Is There Arendt Levinas and the Phenomenology of the Rights of Man
Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, 2018
This paper examines the differences between the thought of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas concerning the "Rights of Man", in relation to stateless persons. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt evinces a profound scepticism towards this ideal, which for her was powerless without being tethered to citizenship. But Arendt's own idea of the "Right to have Rights" is critiqued here as being inadequate to the ethical demand placed upon states by refugees, in failing to articulate just what states might be responsible for. I argue that the ethical philosophy of Levinas meets this lacuna in Arendt's thought, via his concept of the Face as the locus of human dignity and to which states can be recalled to responsibility. Levinas wrote several papers on what he called "the phenomenology of the Rights of Man", and in his phrase, which provides a summation of precisely what is lacking in Arendt's arguments: "In the facea right is there".
2022
This thesis focuses on two questions: Who are stateless peoples and what are their rights. It starts with Hannah Arendt’s “methodology” of political theory so as to develop a method suitable for elaboration on these issues. With the method, the thesis finds that there is a significant lacuna in most of the existing research on statelessness and rightlessness. That is, it seems not able to account for the stateless-as-rightless problem in terms of a collective. Hence, this thesis reconsiders the problem. It contends that a stateless/rightless people, as a collective formed by its members promising to act in concert politically, is excluded from interactions with other peoples around the globe. In this way, stateless peoples refer to those peoples who perform actions under the pervasive global exclusion, e.g. Somalians, Somalilanders, Taiwanese, and the West Papuans. Their actions, nonetheless, are often misunderstood as the right to self-determination. The thesis contends that the concept of self-determination could neither fully account for the peoples’ actions nor do justice to their circumstances. Therefore, it redefines such actions, reading them as the right to have rights. That is, as what I call, to perform actions as a way of life in relation to other peoples in equal and liberal terms. In such a way, the thesis argues that (1) stateless peoples are those who act politically under the circumstances of global exclusion, and (2) their right is a performative right to live, equally and liberally, among other peoples on the Earth. The thesis aims to contribute new understandings not only to the existing literature of (human) rights theory, international legal studies on statelessness, and international political theory but to the stateless/rightless problem.
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.