1The best source of information about Arendt’s life, including this period, is Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
2UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015, unhcr.org.
3Hannah Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’: What Are They?” Modern Review 3:1, Summer 1949, 24–37, 30. A German version of the article appeared later in the same year in Karl Jasper’s journal Die Wandlung under the considerably different title, “Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht” [“There Is Only One Human Right”], Die Wandlung 4, Autumn 1949, 754–70. Arendt seems to have first drafted the essay in 1946. In a letter to Hermann Broch dated September 9 that year, she announces, “[I] have written an article on human rights [habe einen Artikel über Human Rights geschrieben] …” See Hannah Arendt and Hermann Broch, Briefwechsel 1946–1951, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1996.
4Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951. In the same year the first edition of the book appeared in the United Kingdom under the title, The Burden of Our Time, London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. The German “translation” of Origins, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (New ed., Munich: Piper, 1986), did not appear until 1955.
5Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed., San Diego: Harvest, 1968, 297. Subsequent references to this work in this chapter refer to this 1968 edition.
6This is the simplest definition repeated basically verbatim by almost everyone. See Jack Donnelly, The Concept of Human Rights, London: Croom Helm, 1985, 1; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, second ed., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, 1; Maurice Cranston, What Are Human Rights? London: Bodley Head, 1973, 36.
7Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 297.
8Ibid., 298.
9Ibid., 296. Cf. 447.
10Ibid., 299–300.
11Ibid., 292, 300.
12Ibid., 296–97.
13Ibid., 298.
14In 1933, the basic concept of the “right to have rights” was articulated by another Jewish European immigrant to America, Emma Goldman, after being stripped of her American citizenship and then deported for her anarchist activism. However, Goldman never used the exact phrase. See Goldman, A Woman Without a Country, ed. Joseph Ishill, Berkeley Heights, NJ: Oriole Press, 1933.
15The only other appearance of the phrase in Arendt’s work that we know of is in the typed notes for an unpublished lecture titled “Statelessness,” delivered at the University of California at Berkeley in 1955, and even then the layout suggests it was an afterthought: “the right is the right to have / rights, this right is guaranteed by citizenship.” See Arendt, “Statelessness,” Essays and Lectures, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, April 22, 1955, 5.
16Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958). Warren’s other use of the phrase that year was in the majority opinion, where he argued that the “expatriate has lost the right to have rights.” See Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958), 101–2.
17This paper trail was first discovered by Stephen J. Whitfield, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980, 111–12, 285nn47–48.
18Claude Lefort, “Human Rights and the Welfare State” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey, Cambridge: Polity, 1988, 37, cf. 40.
19Jeffrey C. Isaac also makes this observation in Democracy in Dark Times, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, 217n32.
20A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
21Joseph Nevins, “A Right to Work for All,” North American Congress on Latin America, October 19, 2011, nacla.org.
22Thomas D. Williams, “Leftists Push Italy to Follow Ireland on Same-Sex Marriage,” Breitbart, May 24, 2015, breitbart.com.
23European Resettlement Network, “Refugees Have the Right to Have Rights! Campaign #Refugeeshaverights,” resettlement.eu. The announcement of the campaign on December 11, 2015, featured the following quote by Hanna Arendt: “Refugees have the right to have rights.” See European Council on Refugees and Exiles, “Sharing Our Rights with Refugees: ICMC Europe and ECRE Launch End of the Year Campaign,” December 11, 2015, ecre.org.
24Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996, 185.
25Ibid., 82
26Ibid., 198
27Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 59.
28Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 46.
29Benhabib, Rights of Others, 67.
30Ibid., 67–68; cf. “We ought to consider each human being qua human being as a person entitled to basic human rights and not because they are a national or a citizen.” Seyla Benhabib, “Human Rights and the Critique of ‘Humanitarian Reason,’” Reset DOC, July 10, 2014, resetdoc.org.
1Frank Michelman, “Parsing ‘A Right to Have Rights,’” Constellations 3:2, 1996, 201.
2We cannot be sure, however, if Arendt ever consulted the final version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Christoph Menke notes, Arendt refers to a “Bill of the Rights of the United Nations” and, in one footnote, “drafts of the UN Commission.” Hannah Arendt, “Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht,” Die Wandlung 4, December 1949, 769.
3Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951, 296 (my emphasis).
4See Jack Donnelly on the “possession paradox,” the idea that an individual generally only claims to possess rights when he or she has lost them or is in danger of losing them. “Talk of rights,” says Donnelly, “is sensible and appropriate only when rights are in some way at issue.” Jack Donnelly, Concept of Human Rights, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985, 13. Cf. “We talk about rights only when they are at issue … Rights are actually put to use, and thus important enough to talk about, only when they are at issue, when their enjoyment is questioned, threatened, or denied.” Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, third ed., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013, 8.
5See, especially, Christoph Menke, “The ‘Aporias of Human Rights’ and the ‘One Human Right’: Regarding the Coherence of Hannah Arendt’s Argument,” Social Research 74:3, Fall 2007, 739–62.
6Seyla Benhabib, “Human Rights and the Critique of ‘Humanitarian Reason,’” Reset DOC, July 10, 2014, resetdoc.org.
7Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1996, 82.
8Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 56.
9Ibid., 57.
10Idid., 113.
11Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event Context,” trans. Alan Bass, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 80–111. See also Stephanie DeGooyer, “Democracy, Give or Take?” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 5:1, 2014, 93–110.
12We learn a lot about how Benhabib revises Arendtian politics in a chapter section tellingly titled “The Missing Normative Foundations of Arendtian Politics.” In this chapter, Benhabib concedes that Arendt expresses both “melancholia” and “skepticism” about human rights. But she adds that political existentialism is not “a desirable position” for Arendt to occupy. This remark about “desirable positions” is indicative of the slippage throughout Benhabib’s argument between positions that can actually be found in Arendt’s work and positions she would like Arendt to take. For example, Benhabib locates “an implicit ethical gesture,” in the abstraction with which Arendt treats humanity in The Human Condition. As this all remains implied, however, rather than overtly theorized, Benhabib is left to conclude that Arendt’s work must be revised if it is to be comprehensible in a normative framework.
13Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, 168.
14Ibid., 49.
15Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele, “United Nations: Detroit Water Shutoffs Violate Human Rights,” The Root, October 22, 2014, theroot.com.
16Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 39.
17Michelman, “Parsing ‘A Right to Have Rights,’” 206; Keenan: “The rules, contexts, and capacities are not absolutely fixed either, and one version of the basic question of politics is this: How do they change? How are they changed?” See Thomas Keenan, “Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life,” Grey Room 21, 2005, 99–100.
18Arendt, Origins, 283.
19Ibid., 286.
20Ibid., 287.
21Hannah Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’: What Are They?” Modern Review 3:1, Summer 1949, 36.
22Ibid., 34.
23Arendt does keep one positive claim about the “right to have rights” in the “Concluding Remarks” to the first edition of Origins. But she then drops the entire “Concluding Remarks” from the revised edition.
24Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
25Ibid., 34.
26Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1959.
27Arendt, Origins, 291.
28Ibid., 293.
29Ibid., 299.
30Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 41.
31On this point, Arendt cites John Hope Simpson in a footnote: “The problem of statelessness became prominent after the Great War. Before the war, provisions existed in some countries, notably the United States, under which naturalization could be revoked in those cases in which the naturalized person ceased to maintain a genuine attachment to his adopted country. A person so denaturalized became stateless. During the war, the principal European States found it necessary to amend their laws of nationality so as to take power to cancel naturalization”; John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, 231.
32This is in contrast to the Modern Review article where the phrase is used only once.
33Arendt, Origins, 298.
34Ibid.
35Ibid., 269.
36Ibid., 278.
37Ibid., 280.
38Ibid., 301.
39Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, New York: Grove Press, 1954, 15.
40Arendt, Origins, 301.
41Ibid., 278.
42Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2–3, 2004, 297–310.
43Arendt, Origins, xxii.
44Ibid., 277.
1Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, second ed., New York: Meridian, 1968, 297.
2Ibid., 296.
3Ibid.
4Ibid., 296–7.
5Ibid., 297.
6On the constitutive tension in Arendt’s account of the Declaration between the “we hold” and the self-evidence of the truths we hold, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
7She writes: “No matter how [human rights] have once been defined (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, according to the American formula, or as equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty, according to the French); … the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that they are rights of citizens whose loss does not entail absolute rightlessness.” Arendt, Origins, 296.
8Ibid., 299.
9Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 56.
10Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 182. On rights as a political and collective practice of claims-making, see Karen Zivi, Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
11John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980, 8.
12Arendt, Origins, 297–98.
13Ibid., 299.
14Ibid., 302.
15Arendt and Honig also emphasize that even the rights-bearing status of ethnic nationals has been precarious in modernity. As Bonnie Honig puts it in a discussion of the right to have rights, “we need rights because we cannot trust the political communities to which we belong to treat us with dignity and respect; however, we depend for our rights on those very same political communities.” Bonnie Honig, “Another Cosmopolitanism? Law and Politics in the New Europe,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Another Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 107.
16Arendt, Origins, 301.
17Ibid.
18Ibid.
19As Ayten Gündoğdu notes, this danger also holds at the level of international human rights institutions, as well. In her recent book, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, Gündoğdu says that if it was the “deceptive solidity of the nation-state system that rendered the plight of the stateless an anomaly,” it may be in part the “unprecedented ascendency of the human rights framework that risks turning the problems faced by asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants into ‘unfortunate exceptions’ to universal norms that are gradually detaching rights from citizenship status”(11). In other words, our sense of our power to create and instantiate an international rights regime blinds us to the inevitable exclusions perpetuated by that regime and may breed resentment toward those who do not fit within it.
20There is a vast literature on this topic. See, for example, Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, and Makau Mutua, “Human Rights in Africa: The Limited Promise of Liberalism,” African Studies Review 51, 2008, 1, 17–39.
21See, for example, Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004; Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; and Lori Marso, “Marriage and Bourgeois Respectability,” Politics and Gender 6:1, 2010, 145–53.
22Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
23Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, 32.
24Bonnie Honig argues for something similar in “Dead Rights, Live Futures: A Reply to Habermas’ ‘Constitutional Democracy,’” Political Theory 29:6, 2001, 792–805.
1Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, third ed., San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1967, 296.
2Frank Michelman, “Parsing a ‘Right to Have Rights,’” Constellations 3:2, October 1996, 200–8.
3Dolf Sternberger to Hannah Arendt, September 13, 1949, Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Correspondence File, General-Sternberger, Dolf-1946-1953. On Die Wandlung, see Sean A. Forner, German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
4Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking Press, 1965, 279.
5Compare Seyla Benhabib, “International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism,” in Benhabib, ed., Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 225. According to Mira Siegelberg, in a lecture at Berkeley in 1955 Arendt had asserted “one internationally guaranteed right to Citizenship” for individuals while denying states “the right to deprive citizenship.” By the time of Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, Arendt retained her denial of rights claims to states to denationalize and kill, but no longer specifically enunciated membership as a right—even though article 15(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically provides a “right to nationality.” Hannah Arendt, “Statelessness,” Lecture 1955, Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, as cited in Siegelberg, “Hannah Arendt, Statelessness, and the State without Qualities in Postwar Thought,” forthcoming.
6“For some time the aftereffects of the idea of God remained recognizable. In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986, 49.
7Arendt, Origins, 291, as cited in Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005, 14–15. This section of these reflections is related to my reading of Arendt in “Hannah Arendt, Secularization Theory, and the Politics of Secularism,” in Willem Styfthals and Stéphane Symons, eds., Theological Genealogies: Reflections on Secularization in Twentieth-Century Continental Thought, forthcoming.
8Arendt, On Revolution, rev. ed., New York: Viking Press, 1965, 186.
9Arendt, On Revolution, 189.
10Ibid., 184.
11Ibid., 196.
12Ibid., 186.
13Ibid., 148; cf. 207.
14For a history of economic and social rights as part of human rights, see my Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018.
15Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 46.
16Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010.
17On Jacobin radicalism see, for example, Jean-Pierre Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
18Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London: Secker & Warburg, 1952, 150; compare Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, chap. 6. The Jacobins’ great “communist” heir, Gracchus Babeuf, drew extreme scorn in Cold War liberalism, though as far as I know Arendt never mentioned him.
19Arendt, The Human Condition, chap. 43.
20Arendt, On Revolution, 124, 129, 133, 136.
21For one of many attempts to criticize and remedy Arendt’s negligence of economic and social rights that are prestigious today in advocacy, see Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, chap. 2.
22“The actual content of the Constitution was by no means the safeguard of civil liberties but the establishment of an entirely new system of power” (On Revolution, 146).
23Compare Duncan Ivison, “Republican Human Rights?” European Journal of Political Theory 9:1, January 2010, 31–47.
24Cf. Benhabib, “International Law and Human Plurality.”
25Compare Eric A. Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, on the limits of international human rights as a legal project that brooks little institutional experimentalism.
1See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996; Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
2See Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging, New York: Seagull Books, 2007; Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015; Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty, trans. James Swenson, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014; Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
3The only reader of Arendt who even considers that the right to have rights might be something available to nonhuman creatures is Werner Hamacher: “This right is thus valid for all of those who were in the past excluded from civil rights and human rights or who were able to be excluded de jure because they were not viewed as humans, but rather—whether metaphorically or not—as animals, machines, as either beneficial to life or life-threatening.” Werner Hamacher, “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks),” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2–3, Spring/Summer 2004, 354.
4Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 46, emphasis in original.
5Hannah Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’: What Are They?” Modern Review 3:1, Summer 1949, 34; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1951, 439.
6This definition is repeated basically verbatim by almost everyone. See Jack Donnelly, The Concept of Human Rights, London: Croom Helm, 1985, 1; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, second ed., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, 1; Maurice Cranston, What Are Human Rights? London: Bodley Head, 1973, 36. Arendt’s variation is that human rights “deriv[e] solely from the fact of being human” (“‘Rights of Man,’” 25).
7Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed., San Diego: Harvest, 1968, 298. All references to Origins in this chapter refer to this edition unless otherwise noted.
For more critical comments on the role of birth in rights discourse, see Origins, 301; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Penguin, 1963, 30, 36, 160; Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Present: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Penguin, 1968, 242.
8In the Declaration of Independence, the same function is performed by “created,” as in “all men are created equal.” When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1948, however, the decision was made to go with “birth”: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Johannes Morsink helpfully explains that most delegates wanted the emphasis on birth to mean “rights were inherent in the human person. For them the word ‘born’ did just that”; The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, 293.
9Arendt, Origins, 297, 298; The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1951, 435.
10Arendt expresses her skepticism about human nature in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 10), but it is already clear in her use of inverted quote marks around nearly every instance of the word nature in Origins (for example, see 456ff.).
11Arendt describes “mere existence” as “all that is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds,” things we should cherish through “friendship,” “sympathy,” and “love” (Origins, 301).
12Arendt, On Revolution, 20–21.
13Arendt, Origins, 301.
14Ibid. It is worth noting that while Arendt does sometimes say that human beings are by nature unequal (Ibid., 234, 302; On Revolution, 21), this is not the same as saying that they are “born unequal in rights.” As she explained in an unpublished lecture delivered at the University of California at Berkeley in 1955, the only people who would maintain that human beings are born unequal would be Nazis, and presumably all ideological racists; see “Statelessness,” Essays and Lectures, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, April 22, 1955, 3.
15Arendt specifies that the “common origin” of a people was initially linguistic and cultural—which is hardly racial—but after 1814 it gets “described frequently in terms of ‘blood relationships,’ of family ties, of tribal unity, of unmixed origin” (Origins, 166).
16The key source of this idea was the Romantic emphasis on “innate personality and natural nobility” (Origins, 170), concepts used to lay claim to “true nobility” as opposed to titles (such as Baron, Duke, and so on; Ibid., 169).
17Ibid., 166, 169, 170, 164.
18Ibid., 164.
19Ibid., 180. Cf. “Burke enlarged the principle of these privileges to include the whole people” (Ibid., 176).
20Ibid., 169.
21Ibid. By contrast, the argument of the Comte de Boulainvilliers based the superiority the Germanic population of France over the inferior Gauls in a “historical deed, conquest, and not on a physical fact” (Ibid., 163).
22Ibid., 297.
23Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, new ed., Munich: Piper, 1986, 615.
24To be sure, the human nature of which human rights are supposedly an expression is traditionally held to be metaphysical rather than physical. In actual fact, though, it is not hard to detect biology at the bottom of the kind of subjectivity projected by foundationalist models of human rights. In some cases it is decidedly easy, because the human nature in which rights are said to inhere is explicitly conceived in biological terms. See UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights from 1998, as well as the facility with which the US pro-life movement uses the rhetoric of human rights. Even when the properties of human nature said to give human beings their rights are conceived as nonbiological, they are still able to seamlessly substitute for and be substituted by membership in the species Homo sapiens. After all, theorists and advocates of human rights do not take reason or language alone, separated from membership in the human species, to be faculties that qualify individuals as subjects of rights. Indeed, they display a remarkable lack of interest in the reason or language exhibited by animals, and they insist that human beings without properties such as reason or language still have rights insofar as they are members of the human species. In short, rights-giving properties are really only ever said to manifest themselves within specimens of the human species, and membership in this species is made to serve as a stand-in for these properties. Either way, biology still contours the subjects of rights posited by even the traditional metaphysical conception of human rights.
Étienne Balibar also notes “the paradoxical proximity [of the concept of human rights] with naturalist theories of the right of nations, and even races (conceived of as ‘essential nations’)” (Equaliberty, 318–19n15).
25The severity of the escape from reality being attempted here is legible in the final sentence of the 1964 Proposal on the Biological Aspects of Race, where the very call for scientists to “endeavour to prevent the results of their researches from being used in such a biased way that they would serve non-scientific ends” is itself an instance of science being utilized for nonscientific, specifically political, ends. UNESCO, Proposal on the Biological Aspects of Race, unesdoc.unesco.org.
26Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze put the point well in the introduction to Biopolitics: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) when they say Arendt’s “writings on life and politics are ‘biopolitical’ in all but name” (23).
27This theme emerges in The Human Condition and On Revolution. In the latter, for example, she infamously argued that during the French Revolution the properly political project of founding a republican community became overwhelmed by the social task of providing for the impoverished multitude driven by their biological needs (49–105). However, this is not how she conceives of the relation between life and politics in her reading of human rights. If anything, she stresses that, unlike biological needs themselves, the notion that human beings are by nature subjects of rights forces itself upon no one.
28Arendt, Origins, 192–6.
29Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 126–35. Such an aporia also explains why Arendt’s portrait of the human being said to possess rights by virtue of its nature weirdly echoes her description of those forcibly excluded from political community.
30Arendt, Origins, 295. In and of itself the idea of human rights does not necessarily imply that nonhuman beings do not have rights. If human beings have rights by virtue of being what they are, then nonhuman creatures can be allowed to have rights, even equal rights, by virtue of being what they are. However, this qualification is all but absent in the discourse of human rights, whether scholarly, legal, or activist.
31The unfitness of animals to be subjects of rights is sometimes explicitly argued in the name of a defense of human rights. For diverse examples, see Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; Wesley J. Smith, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement, New York: Encounter Books, 2010; George Kateb, Human Dignity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
32Arendt, Origins, 1951, 439. Cf. The right to have rights “cannot be expressed in the categories of the eighteenth century because they presume that rights spring immediately from the ‘nature’ of man”(Origins, 297). Cf. “‘Rights of Man,’” 43.
33Burke, quoted in Arendt, Origins, 175–6; cf. 299.
34Arendt, “‘Rights of Man,’” 34.
35Arendt, Origins, 299.
36Ibid., 297.
37Arendt, Origins, 1951, 439.
38Ibid., 268.
39Ibid., 295.
40The case of people who are formally members of a political community but systematically deprived of practical enjoyment of their rights might seem to present an exception. Arendt’s position is, however, nuanced enough to take this into account. In Chapter 9 of Origins she herself argues that “national minorities” living in the new countries formed out of the Austro-Hungarian empires and Czarist empires were de jure citizens but de facto non-citizens, since the institutions that were supposed to enforce their formal rights were functionally useless. Margaret R. Somers has argues in Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2008) that many citizens of contemporary nation-states also experience this sort of disjunction between having rights on paper but not in practice, insofar as their precarious socioeconomic standing under neoliberal capitalism deprives them of genuine standing as rights-bearing members of a political community. African Americans present an especially glaring example of those who have to negotiate this predicament.
41Arendt, Origins, 267, 279, 290, 293, 294, 295, 300; Arendt, “‘Rights of Man,’” 26; Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge, 607.
42Arendt, Origins, 295–6.
43Ibid., 295, 286.
44Ibid., 295, 297; cf. 286, 292.
45Ibid., 295–96.
46Arendt, “‘Rights of Man,’” 33–34. This passage was dropped from the revised version of the article that became Chapter 9 of Origins. While it was moved to the “Concluding Remarks” of the first edition of that book (433–4), that entire section was removed from the revised edition of the book (1968). The noninclusion of the passage in Chapter 9 of Origins seems unintentional for two reasons. First, after announcing in this chapter that the “danger in the existence of such a people is twofold,” Arendt goes on to detail only one danger, the second being the one left out (p. 302). Second, the passage does appear in the same chapter in the German version of the book, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (624). Given its focus on disappearance, it seems appropriate that this passage was deleted! This entire passage should be read in conjunction with her description of the mindset of the European imperialists, which allowed them to murder Africans without realizing it: “when European men massacred them they were somehow not aware that they had committed murder” (Origins, 192). Also relevant here is Arendt’s description, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006), of the person at the center of that book as an embodiment of the “new type of criminal” who “commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong” (276).
47The version of this passage found in the German edition of Origins corroborates this reading: “If someone is murdered, it is as if a wrong or even harm happens to no one” (Elemente und Ursprünge 624).
48The same idea explains another of Arendt’s outrageous claims: “The calamity of the rightless is … not that they are oppressed, but that no one wants even to oppress them” (Arendt, Origins, 295–6). Jacques Rancière has criticized this assertion both for its “contemptuous tone” and for its assumption that there exists “a situation and a status ‘beyond oppression.’” He counters that “there were people who wanted to oppress these refugee populations and laws to do so”; Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, 64. What Rancière does not appreciate, however, is that Arendt is using the word “oppression” in a specific sense established in an earlier chapter of Origins. Between the English imperialists and native Africans, she says, there was such “an absolute division of interests to the point where they are not even permitted to conflict” that “in comparison, exploitation, oppression, or corruption look like safeguards of human dignity because exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, corruptor and corrupted still live in the same world, still share the same goals, fight each other for the possession of the same things”; Arendt, Origins, 212. In this usage “oppression” is a social relation that presupposes not that the parties involved in the relation are equal in rights—not that at all—but that they at least inhabit a shared world, something that makes mutual struggle possible. If, then, Arendt says “no one wants even to oppress” rightless people, it is out of neither personal contempt for them on her part nor blindness to the violence to which they are subject. Rather, it is out of an understanding that, in the eyes of the communities from which they are excluded, the rightless do not inhabit a world in which a struggle over the possession of particular rights is possible. One can oppress only those who one acknowledges, however begrudgingly, are capable of claiming rights. But those who exclude the rightless do not think of them as having the capacity for rights in the first place.
49Arendt, Origins, 294–5.
50Arendt here seems to be anticipating the conception of conscience she develops in the famous chapter “The Two-in-One” (in The Life of the Mind, San Diego: Harcourt, 1978). There she describes those without a conscience as able to “live with themselves” precisely because they are “not fully alive” (191).
51In On Revolution, Arendt powerfully explains the phenomenological operation at work here in a discussion of slavery in the early United States. Slavery, she argues, is an institution that “carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty.” If the nonenslaved white working poor in early America were, as John Adams had already noted, “overlooked” in public, slaves, Arendt points out, were “wholly overlooked.” The agency of poor whites may have been restricted to voting for wealthier political actors who, in principle at least, enacted their opinions, but black slaves were simply not perceived as subjects with interests or desires, let alone opinions, that could be represented politically (61). The connection with slavery is not so unmotivated as it might appear. During her description of the tragedy of the rightless in Chapter 9 of Origins, she already considered the fundamental similarities in the status of slaves and the stateless (297). I should add that Arendt does not believe that any phenomenological violence can disappear people totally or forever. In the case of black people in the United States, this was already suggested by the postbellum inclusion of black people within the body politic of the republic, the shortcomings of which Arendt discusses in “Civil Disobedience,” Crises of the Republic, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1972, 49–102.
52Arendt, Origins, 290, 301.
53Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” 63–67. Rancière’s revival of the old claim that Arendt erects an insurmountable wall separating politics from mere life, thus excluding certain groups of people from participating in the management of public affairs, might be informed by the prominence of a conservative interpretation of Arendt in French philosophy in the 1980s. See Andrew Schaap, “Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Rancière’s Critique of Hannah Arendt,” European Journal of Political Theory, 10:1, 2011, 22–45. But it is hard not to feel Rancière’s claim that Arendt erects a “rigid opposition” separating the private realm of life and the public realm of politics betrays his own strained attempt to establish another opposition: one separating Arendt’s argument about how the rightless claim rights from his own. The fact he omits any reference to the “right to have rights” makes this seem only more plausible.
54Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, 121–2.
55This point is well understood by Arendt’s closest readers. See Bonnie Honig Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 61; Judith Butler Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly 80; Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty 171–2; Ayten Gündogdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
56Honig makes a similar point when she writes: “Indeed, Arendt’s right to have rights—a polemical, political call—directs our attention repeatedly to the need for a politics whereby to express and address the paradox as it is experienced by minorities, the stateless, the powerless, and the hapless”; in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Another Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 107–8.
57Arendt, Origins, 278–80.
58Ibid., 293; cf. with this statement: The stateless suffered “the loss of legal status” not just “in their own, but in all countries” (294).
59This was the way the Hungarian government, in the lead-up to a 2016 national referendum on whether to approve or reject the European Union’s plan to distribute newly arrived migrants amongst EU member states, summarized its argument against the plan. While Hungary is an outlier in terms of the extent to which the xenophobia and racism undergirding its nationalism is open, it also makes explicit the logic often invoked by basically all countries.
60Arendt identifies nationalism and racism as responsible for placing such pressure on the legal institutions comprising the state that it ceased to fulfill its traditional task, “the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality,” and began to “grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the community by right of origin and fact of birth”; ibid., 230ff; cf. 275.
61Important contributions to this debate include Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; Robert Garner and Siobhan O’Sullivan, The Political Turn in Animal Rights, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016; Robert Garner, A Theory of Justice for Animals: Animal Rights in a Nonideal World, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; and Alasdair Cochrane, An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory, London: Palgrave, 2010.
62For a wide range of moral and legal arguments to this effect, see Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cora Diamond’s contribution to this volume “Eating Meat and Eating People” is especially relevant to our current topic (93–107). Her critique of the traditionally biological basis of the argument for animal rights and her sketch of an understanding of animals as “fellow creatures” resonates with Arendt’s critique of human rights as biopolitics and her affirmation of the right to have rights.
63Arendt, Origins, 1951, 430.
64Arendt, Origins, 292, 287; Elemente und Ursprünge, 613.
65The name given to the largest unofficial refugee camp in Western Europe, “The Jungle,” located on the outskirts of Calais, already evokes the point here.
66Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, New York: Routledge, 1992, 18. Gary Francione has argued in Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995) that within the laws that affect most animals, the only “right” that is provided animals is the demand to have rather important interests, such as the interest in not being killed, balanced against less important interests of its human owners, such as the interest in making money. And it is deeply questionable whether that is a right at all.
67I should point out that even this assumption is being submitted to scrutiny by political theorists taking up the question of the animal. See especially Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 103–22.
68Tobin Siebers, “Disability and the Right to Have Rights,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 27:1–2, Winter/Spring 2007. The entire objection seems premised on a confusion of the performer of the act of claiming rights with the holder of the rights, being a contributor to a political compact with being a member of the polity formed through such a compact, or what Frank I. Michelman describes as the process of producing the right to have rights and the process of distributing it (“Parsing ‘A Right to have Rights’” in Constellations, 3:2, 1996, 200–8. A more sophisticated version of this objection is voiced by Étienne Balibar (Equaliberty, 173) and Anne Phillips (The Politics of the Human, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 70, 79). The performative logic that structures the production of the right to have rights, they argue, directly manifests the human capacities. This argument, however, depends upon a reductive model of performativity that ignores all that we learned about performativity from Derrida and de Man.
69This is why someone who advocates for justice for animals as cogently as Cary Wolfe moves too quickly when he says, in Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013) that for Arendt individuals can possess the right to have rights only if they display “the human being’s capacity for speech and language” (7).
70Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, 623. The corresponding passage in Origins (302) lacks the explicit reference to “the state of nature,” though that phrase is used elsewhere in the same chapter: “these rightless peoples are indeed thrown into a peculiar state of nature” (300).
71Arendt, Origins 1951, 436. Cf. 439.
72The right to have rights is “the new law of the earth” for which Arendt called in the preface to Origins (ix).
1International Olympic Committee, “Refugee Olympic Team to Shine Spotlight on Worldwide Refugee Crisis,” June 3, 2016, olympic.org.
2Heather Saul, “Pope Francis Writes Letter to Refugee Olympic Team: ‘I wish your courage serve as a cry for peace and solidarity,’” Independent, August 9, 2016, independent.co.uk.
3UNHCR, “With 1 Human in Every 113 Affected, Forced Displacement Hits Record High,” June 20, unhcr.org.
4Didier Fassin has written eloquently about this in “From Right to Favor,” Nation, April 5, 2016. And as I noted in “Our Friends Who Live Across the Sea,” The Baffler, June 2016: “This shift did not happen spontaneously. After World War II, workers were needed to help rebuild European nations that would soon be players in the Cold War, which meant various populations were welcomed into Western Europe first for their labor power and later for their symbolic pro-democracy, anti-Communist significance. But today, unemployment is rising and Islamophobia has superseded the Red Scare.”
5Arendt, Origins, 135.
6Ibid., 296–7.
7Ibid., 295.
8Pew Research Center, “Refugee Surge Brings Youth to an Aging Europe,” October 8, 2015, pewresearch.org.
9I highly recommend Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 94.
10Arendt, Origins, 296.
11Ibid., 148.
12Ibid., 138.
13David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 34.
14Arendt, Origins, 137–8.
15Though the relationship is arguably more coincidental than causal, neoliberalism and human rights are both outgrowths of the postwar period, and it’s also worth noting that neither truly hit their stride until the seventies. Both were constructed on a foundation of skepticism, or outright hostility, toward collectivism. As contributor Samuel Moyn argues elsewhere, the discourse of human rights was seized upon, in part, as a utopian yet market-friendly alternative to socialism and communism.
16Arendt, Origins, 300.
17“Public Rights and Private Interests,” in M. Mooney and F. Stuber, eds., Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, 108.
18Gerry Mullany, “World’s 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says,” New York Times, January 16, 2017.
19Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, New York: Mariner Books, 1972, 84.