The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
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.
'Human Rights do not exist': thinking about and beyond the existence of human rights
Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2023
This article examines the critical positions taken by two prominent figures of the twentieth-century philosophical tradition, Panajotis Kondylis and Gilles Deleuze, regarding the existence of human rights. In their ways, both thinkers identify a problem with the (non)existence of human rights, particularly with human rights' invocation of universal or eternal values. According to Deleuze, this all-encompassing, universalist language of human rights promotes a problematic way of thinking that 'thinks' in abstraction. For Kondylis, human rights do not exist, as their universalist claims are a matter of political exploitation and/or conceptual confusion. By focusing on the interplay between nonexistence and 'sham' or 'abstract existence', this article aims to critically examine our ways of thinking, in terms of human rights or beyond them, and how such a problematisation may pave the way for further discussions regarding the (non)place of human rights in our contemporary and future state of affairs.
Human Rights: the unstoppable force
In the beginning of the century, global processes produced numerous challenges to theorists because theory no longer reflected reality. Population movements, organized civil society, transnational companies changed the status of sovereignty. Rights no longer stemmed from private attributes of nationality, people have been seeking in human rights legislation, universal principles and international instruments to guarantee their well-being. Every human being is born with a framework of inalienable rights. Moreover, that means that we agreed that principles such as dignity were worth preserving, which was not always the case. During this article, it is aimed to show how society and the Human Rights framework aggregated values that moved us closer to the idea of society we want to become. In addition, it is shown how Institutions and nongovernmental actors were a big part of this culture change. The sovereign acts of states increasingly became privileges from which derived rights and duties. From the time that states began to join international organizations, ratify human rights treaties, they become willingly parts of a framework of legal protection to ensure legitimacy. However, this legal framework provides standards that must be followed in order to maintain stability in the international system. The 60s and 70s are known as times of great turbulence in the economic and political sphere. After this period, non-state actors emerge with strength, and relevant role to be considered and understand in the new world dynamics. The term globalization is now commonly used to refer to the intensification of transnational interactions and cross-border. The multiplicity of actors and the emergence of transnational civil society organizations are important factors to explain the change in the structure, through the strengthening of human rights culture and the transformation of the identity of the actors as more moral. Most of the information transmission and awareness of rules and policies focusing on protection of the individual is made by civil society.
Transformations of Human Rights Within Ruptures and Continuity: A Historico-Sociological Approach
Norbert Elias in Troubled Times, 2021
Can the 'human rights' be considered the 'last utopia' of our epoch? Do they have nothing in common with the 'Rights of Man' of the eighteenth century, or is there a continuity between the first and the latter? This chapter aims to shed light on these theoretical and political or even philosophical questions from a historical-sociological standpoint. Sociology has long displayed a certain scepticism regarding human rights. The chapter reviews some works in contemporary sociology nonetheless devoted to human rights. Then it explores the path opened up by the long-term approach of Norbert Elias. For him, in an era of globalised interdependencies, the development of human rights constitutes an indicator of the construction of a political community on the scale of humanity, yet this process is fragile. More broadly, the claims related to these rights reveal both certain continuity and profound transformations since the eighteenth century, which are also related to the transformation of the role played by the state.
Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics
Law and Critique, 2009
Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.