7 - The ‘right to have rights’

Summary

Hannah Arendt's piece on the "right to have rights" furnishes two distinct reading in French political philosophy that correspond respectively with two contemporary crittiques of human rights. According to the first interpretation, which cast Arendt in a conservative mould, human rights never exist except as the rights of the nationals. According to a second interpretation, coming from the radical left, Arendt's writings show that human rights are a kind of duplicitous humanism inextricably linked to the assertion of sovereign violence. In counterpoise to these interpretations, we show taht Arendt's texts neither devaluate abstract humanism, nor launch an assault on hypocrisy in human rights rhetoric, nor restrict human rights to the framework of a national collectivity. Finally, we foreground alternative French readings suggesting that Arendt's work in fact embodies a "political" conception of human rights.