Book Review: PEG BIRMINGHAM, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006, 161 pp., ISBN 9780253218650, US$24.95 (pbk)
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663909104213 |
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
PEG BIRMINGHAM, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common
Responsibility. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006, 161 pp., ISBN
9780253218650, US$24.95 (pbk).
In the wake of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt (1966: 296–7) wrote that ‘we
became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a
framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions)’ only after the world
was confronted by the plight of stateless people who had ‘lost and could not regain
these rights’. Contrary to the revolutionary declarations of the 18th century, Arendt’s
notion of a right to have rights is based on an historical awareness of the alienability
of human rights. But as Frank Michelman (1997) discusses, there is something para-
doxical about a right to have rights. For if I am without rights, how can I invoke a
right to claim back my rights? And if I cannot lose the right to have rights, how could
I be rightless in the first place?
We might resolve the paradox by differentiating between two different kinds of
right such that the right to have rights refers to an abstract moral right to conven-
tional legal rights as members of a political community. But this goes against the grain
of Arendt’s political theory: she rejects the search for moral norms through transcen-
dent reason, attempting instead to uncover moral precepts that are immanent to
political life. Another possible interpretation suggested by Michelman is to under-
stand the right to have rights as a right to political inclusion since rights are produced
through participation in action. But this interpretation only seems to reinstate the
paradox. For how could you claim to possess a right (to have rights) that you had not
participated in producing?
Rather than being a moral right to a set of legal rights, Michelman argues that we
should understand the right to have rights as a politically ungrounded right to
inclusion that enables a range of politically grounded rights that we enjoy as members
of a political community. But the question returns: if the right to have rights is not
politically grounded, what is its ground? Peg Birmingham argues that all Arendt’s
work can be read as a sustained attempt ‘to work out a theoretical foundation for a
reformulation of the modern notion of human rights’ (p. 3). She suggests that Arendt
provides an ontological foundation for human rights in the ‘event’ of natality which
refers both to the fact of our birth into a social world (the principle of givenness) and
our freedom to act within that world (the principle of initium).
The principle of initium refers to Arendt’s understanding that human dignity is
realized through our freedom to act, to initiate an event. The end of political
community should not be to secure our private freedoms but to make available a space
of appearance in which we can enjoy our freedom of action and thereby realize our
humanity. This Aristotelian view underlies Arendt’s observation that, although
human rights are in principle most applicable to those deprived of their citizenship,
in practice, ‘it seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES © The Author(s), 2009
Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
0964 6639, Vol. 18(2), 265–282
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909104213
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