Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility

NOTES

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), xxxiii. 2. Ibid., 82. Oddly, in her recent book The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), Benhabib rejects the very framework she criticizes Arendt’s thought of lacking; namely, a philosophical universalism grounded in claims about a universal human essence or human nature. She argues instead for a universalism that encompasses three dimensions: moral universalism, the claim that all human beings should be considered as moral equals; legal universalism, the claim that there are certain basic rights that should be given to all human beings that are reflected in legal institutions; and justificatory universalism, rooted in rational normativity with its ideals of impartiality and objectivity. Benhabib’s questions to Arendt come back to haunt her: “Why are there certain basic rights that should be given to all human beings?” and “Why should all human beings be considered as moral equals?” Arendt’s philosophical account of the right to have rights answers both of these questions. In doing so, Arendt offers a philosophical universalism that is not grounded in a universal human essence or human nature; rather, it is grounded in the universal event of natality. 3. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199. 4. Ibid., 200. 5. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 198–199. 6. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 54. 7. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15. 8. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, edited and with an introduction by Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 82. To ground human rights in humanity, Ignatieff claims, is to court a threefold risk: “It puts the demands, needs, and rights of the human species above any other and therefore risks legitimizing an entirely instrumental relation to other species; second, . . . it authorizes the same instrumental and exploitative relationship to nature; and, finally, it lacks the metaphysical claims necessary to limit the human use of human life, in such instances as abortion or medical experimentation” (82–83). 9. Ibid., 83. 10. Ibid. In another passage, citing Elie Wiesel’s claim that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has become the “sacred text of a world-wide secular religion,” Ignatieff writes, “Human rights has become the major article of faith of a secular culture that fears it believes in nothing else. It has become the lingua franca of global moral thought, as English has become the lingua franca of the global economy. The question I want to ask about this rhetoric is this: If human rights is a set of beliefs, what does it mean to believe in it? Is it a belief like a faith? Is it a belief like a hope? Is it something else entirely?” (53). Arendt avoids all forms of belief, whether faith or hope, by providing a philosophical account of the foundation of human rights. 1. THE EVENT OF NATALITY 1. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994), 403. 2. Arendt is careful to make a distinction between moral or legal responsibility, on the one hand, and political responsibility, on the other. The predicament of common responsibility refers to the political responsibility inherent in the ideal of humanity. See her article “Collective Responsibility” in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 150–151. I am indebted to Wesley Swedlow for his insights on the role terror plays in Arendt’s notion of humanity, especially those developed in our collaborative keynote presentation at the conference “Collaborations : On Responsibility,” Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, April 5, 2002. 3. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 22. 4. Ibid., 20. 5. Ibid., 16. 6. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15. 7. Ibid., 79. 8. Ibid., 79–80. 9. Ibid. 10. Jürgen Habermas has astutely observed that all Rawls has shown is that “a normative theory of justice of the sort he proposes can gain entry to a culture in which basic liberal convictions are already rooted through tradition and political socializations in everyday practices and in the intuitions of individual citizens.” See Between Facts...