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- Title
RIGHTS, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE MODERN FORM OF THE SOCIAL: DILEMMAS OF ARENDTIAN REPUBLICANISM.
- Authors
Cohen, Jean L.
- Abstract
The article discusses the dilemmas of Arendtian republicanism. Hannah Arendt was a republican thinker who understood the importance of rights in the liberal sense. She argued strongly for the constitutional articulation of rights to property, privacy, and personal autonomy, even though her main focus was on the problem of how to establish and protect public spaces for the exercise of political freedom and action. At no stage in her political thought however, did Arendt present a satisfactory account of the source of basic or "fundamental" rights. Nor did she ever revise her strong critique of the discourse of human rights, originally developed in the famous chapter "Decline of the Nation-State: End of the Rights of Man" in Origins of Totalitarianism, despite her insistence that there is one universal human right, namely the "right to have rights," the right to citizenship. Arendt's first-hand experience of the total disregard for the most basic rights of people made stateless between the wars and the apparent uselessness of international guarantees for minority rights, led her to draw the following conclusion: neither the nation-state structure nor the discourse of human rights can protect individuals against arbitrary and lawlessness.
- Subjects
REPUBLICANISM; ARENDT, Hannah, 1906-1975; CIVIL rights; POLITICAL autonomy; CITIZENSHIP; WAR; COLLECTIVISM (Political science)
- Publication
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory, 1996, Vol 3, Issue 2, p164
- ISSN
1351-0487
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-8675.1996.tb00052.x