On the Right to Have Rights

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged according to actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, when there suddenly emerged millions of people who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt first wrote the phrase "the right to have rights" in a publication in the 1949 summer issue of Modern Review.¹ Many years prior to that publication, Arendt was a stateless refugee. Fleeing Hitler's Germany, she sought refuge in France. Yet after the German occupation of France in 1940, Arendt once again had to flee, but appealing to US diplomats would not do her any good since the "State Department discouraged the issuance of visas to any of the thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis."² Luckily, as it turned out, Arendt eventually managed to become a naturalized US citizen in 1951. Reflecting on her struggle as a stateless refugee, Arendt's phrase "the right to have rights" appeared again near the end of her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the book, Arendt thought about the preconditions that are necessary for any civil, political, or social rights. If such rights were to exist, there first had to be a "right to have rights."³ But what might it mean to claim a "right" to have rights? And what might Arendt have meant in coining this infamous phrase?

Many activists have treated the phrase as an "uncomplicated synonym for human rights."⁴ On a first pass reading of the phrase, we might be inclined to take it as the assertion that behind all civil rights stands an inalienable moral right, one fundamental right that is pre-legal. Understood in this way, the singular right in the phrase was "born out of the realization that in order to have rights, it seems that one must first have a right to be a member of a political community."⁵ All well and good. But Arendt was skeptical of inalienable moral rights. So, the usage of the singular "right" in the phrase gave rise to a paradox for her: if one does not already belong to a right-conferring political community, then how can one assert the right to belong? Put differently, if you need to belong in order to assert any rights, then how can there be a "right to have rights"?⁶ In an attempt to clarify Arendt's phrase, and the puzzles it raises, The Right to Have Rights presents us with an extended meditation on the phrase. Rather than solicit four separate analyses of the phrase, each chapter examines a piece of Arendt's phrase: in Chapter 1, Stephanie DeGooyer examines the singular "right"; in Chapter 2, Lida Maxwell examines what it is "to have" rights; in Chapter 3, Samuel Moyn examines the plural "rights" contained in Arendt's phrase; and finally, in Chapter 4, Alastair Hunt asks us to consider the question that the phrase poses: who are the bearers of these rights?

In what follows I will briefly examine each chapter of the book (omitting commentary on the afterword), and then offer up a critique of what I take to be a shortcoming of the book, namely, its lack of engagement with natural rights theorists (and so-called Orthodox accounts of human rights).

In the first chapter of the book Stephanie DeGooyer attempts to complicate the popular understanding of Arendt's phrase, understood as an "uncomplicated synonym for human rights."⁷ DeGooyer asks if this reading "merely restate[s] and reinforce[s] the tautological relationship between citizen and universal rights that Arendt identifies in her critique of human rights?"⁸ Given Arendt's skepticism of human rights, DeGooyer wonders how Arendt can "speak of a right for millions of stateless persons to belong to a political community without, at the same time...