Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility

TWO: The Principle of Initium: Freedom, Power, and the Right to Have Rights

In the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the task of thinking today lies in “bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.” Comprehending, she claims, means the “attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be” (OT, viii). Nowhere is this attempt at comprehension more evident than in Arendt’s facing up to her own experience as a refugee who, having lost her status as a citizen, lost all claim to human rights. At the very moment when protection under the auspices of universal human rights was most desperately needed, no such protection was granted. Outside the law and not belonging to any political community, she and her fellow refugees were reduced to “mere naked human beings” in a “condition of complete rightlessness” (296). Most devastating, she argues, is that the world found nothing sacred in the “abstract nakedness” of being human: “If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declaration of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (300). Indeed, she points out, the gas chambers were set in motion by first depriving Jews “of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship ) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps. . . . The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged ” (296). TWO The Principle of Initium: Freedom, Power, and the Right to Have Rights The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future Facing up to the condition of being reduced to a mere human being, a situation in which she literally had to flee for her life, Arendt offers a radical critique of the modern formulation of human rights. She argues that these supposedly inalienable universal human rights were from their inception inseparably tied to the sovereignty of a people. Her critique and reformulation of the modern understanding of human rights in large part rests on a critique and reformulation of the notions of freedom and agency at the very heart of modern human rights discourse, which, she argues, are framed in terms of sovereignty, both individual and collective. Indeed, Arendt’s location of freedom and justice in the more foundational issue of the right to have rights goes far in answering her critics, such as Dana Villa, who charge Arendt with ignoring the liberal tradition, especially its notion of justice. In her discussion of modern human rights, Arendt does not dismiss the liberal tradition; rather, she shows how this tradition, with its paramount concern for freedom and justice, does not grasp that politically there is something more fundamental: “Something much more fundamental than freedom or justice, which are the rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice, or when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not do. This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human rights” (296). For Arendt, more fundamental than the rights of justice and freedom is the right to action and opinion and the right to belong to a political community in which one’s speech and action are rendered significant : “We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and this means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions), as well as the right to belong to some kind of organized community , only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation” (296– 297). Arendt’s theoretical reformulation of the fundamental right to have rights emerges out of her reflection on the initium inherent in the ontological event of natality that makes every human being a beginner. Arendt is indebted to...