What do you think?
Rate this book
حقِ حقداشتن
حقِ حق داشتن مفهومی تازه و منبعی مهم برای تفکّر و کنشِ سیاسی در زمانهی ما است. عصری که روز به روز و در گوشه و کنار جهان بر شمار افرادی که عاجز از تعلّق به یک جامعهی سیاسی هستند افزوده میشود. هانا آرنت این عبارت را در نقد «حقوق بشر» بهکار میگرفت و او بر آن بود که اساساً مفهوم حقوق بشر انسجام لازم را جهت اینکه مبنایی برای نظریهی سیاسی دموکراتیک باشد ندارد. در کتاب حاضر، سعی بر آن است که با ارائهی قرائتی نقّادانه از حقِ حق داشتن، اصول و منابعی برای تلاشهای دموکراتیک پرورده شود.
172 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2019
31 people are currently reading
400 people want to read
About the author
Stephanie Degooyer
3 books2 followersStephanie DeGooyer is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Willamette University. Her work focuses on the intersection between law, politics, and aesthetics. She is completing a book called The Aesthetics of Democracy.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 18 reviews
December 17, 2022
کتاب درباره حقوق بشر زندگی هانا آرنت و درک او از حق و حقوق بشر و افکار سیاسی -اجتماعی در این باره بود. کتاب خیلی مفیدی بود اما من خب چون حقوق بین الملل و حقوق بشر رشته دانشگاهی ام بوده خیلی از جملات کتاب رو در دانشگاه خونده بودم و اکثر کتاب رو قبلا یک دور خونده بودم در کتاب های مختلف ولی باید بگم از ارزش و مفید بودن کتاب چیزی کم نمیکنه.
June 30, 2018
This brief book comprises a number of short essays contemplating a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in Chapter 9 of her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The phrase was used by Arendt not as a statement of the ultimate human right, but as part of a radical critique of human rights. The phrase has had a restricted role to play in the past and even Arendt did not return to it, but it is emerging today as a topic of great significance. In the USA and the UK, notably, it seems to be the case that migrants are being treated as though they had greatly reduced rights, if any, and indeed we see a Tory Government in the UK explicitly hostile to the very concept of human rights, while Trump's USA is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council.
Most shocking is the degree to which people seem not to be shocked. We are watching our rights being stripped from us and cannot raise a whimper of protest. What this book suggests is that we cannot assume our humanity will secure any rights whatever. We will only enjoy the rights we are prepared to work for. The rights we have can be taken from us.
The rest of this review is in direct quotes.
“ Arendt cites John Hope Simpson in a footnote: “The problem of statelessness became prominent after the Great War. Before the war, provisions existed in some countries, notably the United States, under which naturalization could be revoked in those cases in which the naturalized person ceased to maintain a genuine attachment to his adopted country. A person so denaturalized became stateless. During the war, the principal European States found it necessary to amend their laws of nationality so as to take power to cancel naturalization.” [p119 footnote] In 1933, the basic concept of the “right to have rights” was articulated by another Jewish European immigrant to America, Emma Goldman, after being stripped of her American citizenship and then deported for her anarchist activism. However, Goldman never used the exact phrase.[p116]
... in the decades after World War I, ... millions of people were suddenly living in European countries without claiming citizenship to any of them. Such people fell into two, often overlapping groups: “national minorities” and “stateless persons.”... “the stateless,” were both functionally and formally not citizens of any country. Indeed, they had been stripped of any citizenship they had possessed through governmental acts of mass denationalization. Among those affected were people from Spain, Turkey, Hungary, and Germany—including Arendt herself. [p12]
Arendt identifies nationalism and racism as responsible for placing such pressure on the legal institutions comprising the state that it ceased to fulfil its traditional task, “the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality,” and began to “grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the community by right of origin and fact of birth.” [p134] “In Chapter 9 of Origins she herself argues that “national minorities” living in the new countries formed out of the Austro-Hungarian empires and Czarist empires were de jure citizens but de facto non-citizens, since the institutions that were supposed to enforce their formal rights were functionally useless. [p129] ... No longer belonging to any nation-state, these people were “human and nothing but human.”[p12]...
To this day, human rights are said to be intrinsic to the very existence of human beings, regardless of nationality, gender, language, religion, ethnicity, or any other specific status. Since they are thought to be secured by the idea of humanity as such and not bestowed by an earthly power, they cannot, or so the theory goes, be taken away by any earthly power... Indeed, the three historical statements of human rights—the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—all boldly assert these rights to be “inalienable.” When all else is lost, human rights are what humans fall back on as a natural birthright. [p12]
Benhabib is a modern student of Arendt who argues that 'even if the right of all human beings to have rights is not already a reality on the ground, it is... a regulative ideal that the most powerful actors in national and international politics are now forced to negotiate. National sovereignty, in other words, is increasingly constrained by international legal norms.... Changes in international law and politics since the publication of Origins, she contends, have created a forum above the level of the nation-state in which the rights of human beings who are not citizens can be asserted and enforced with increasing effectiveness. Principal among these developments are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (both 1976), as well as the institutions of compliance and monitoring that accompanied them, such as the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights and on Refugees and the European Court of Human Rights. [p19]
But far from finding any relief in their human rights, the minorities and stateless people in Europe who lacked citizenship, appearing to others to be purely human, were exposed to extreme forms of violence. Being human, as opposed to being a citizen, certainly did not save six million Jews from being killed by the Nazis. On the contrary, as Arendt emphasizes, the Nazis challenged the Jews’ most basic of all so-called human rights, the “right to live,” only after carefully turning them into human beings by depriving them of “all legal status” in the eyes of any government. “The world,” she writes with chilling understatement, “found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” [p13]
That Arendt was able to leave war-entrenched Europe, for example, had nothing to do with her humanity or the intercession of any concerned government: it was circumstance and accident. Whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which appeared in 1948 in response to these events, proclaimed that human beings have rights simply by virtue of being human, Arendt knew firsthand that in order to have rights, individuals must be more than mere human beings. They must be members of a political community. ... Hence, Arendt declared that before there can be any specific civil, political, or social rights, there must be such a thing as a “right to have rights. [p8]
To a considerable extent her criticism was also articulated by the famous opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who already in the eighteenth century dismissed human rights (or “the rights of man” as they were still called then) as a theoretical abstraction. Against “the rights of man” he affirmed “the rights of Englishmen,” which he described as “an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom,” and not to human beings in general. Burke’s insight here is, in Arendt’s words, that “rights materialize only within a given political community, that they depend on our fellow-men and on a tacit guarantee that the members of a community give to each other.” For this reason, she says, Burke displayed “pragmatic soundness” in expressing his preference for the rights of citizens over human rights. [p82]
As the scholar Ayten Gündoğdu points out, Arendt does not want “to endorse [Burke’s] argument that takes political membership as a given.” Burke holds that positive, historical rights have always already rendered the Rights of Man redundant....In championing the laws of civil society over natural rights, Burke presumes there is no such place as “nowhere” and that there is no such thing as mere existence outside the context of a nation... For Burke, the Rights of Man are an unnecessary accessory to citizen rights. Arendt, however, sees something worth keeping... Like Burke, Arendt understands that the primary importance of institutions is their function as the safe keeper of rights. Humanity is an impossible foundation for rights whose security depends on the protection offered by a nation-state. But unlike him, she makes her argument from the historical vantage point of someone who is witnessing the disintegration of the nation-state system, a system that was only in its infancy during the French Revolution when Burke was writing... Arendt refuses to provide an alternative authority for human rights, but neither does she resign herself to cynicism toward them. The “right to have rights” is her first and last line of defense against Burke’s conservatism. It is the only thing that prevents a wholesale slide into his cynicism about human rights as hopeless idealisms .[pp46,47]
...people who are excluded from political community have been deprived of the very status of holders of rights. Such people are not simply “unequal before the law”; rather, they have been “forced outside the pale of the law.” They have lost not just one or more of the “specific rights” that citizens normally enjoy; rather, they have lost “all rights.” Their situation is not merely the loss of rights but rather “fundamental,” “absolute,” and “complete rightlessness.” In short, they have lost the very status of “subject of rights.” [p84]
At the end of Chapter 9 in Origins Arendt is fairly clear that we cannot, with any certainty, think of “humanity” as a guarantor of human rights because it is civilized humanity that engineered rightlessness in the first place: “the danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions, which despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.”[p42] We become aware of the right to have rights, in other words, not through rational or philosophical consideration of moral norms, but instead through the concrete, political experience of a new form of oppression that took away rights we did not know we had. [p46]
In the United States, for example, it is a principle of our founding document that “all men were created equal” and that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[p46]... the truth of the natural-ness of these rights is something that “we hold” to be “self-evident.” The Declaration gives the supposedly natural possession of rights, in other words, a democratic, political grounding; it is because we hold these truths to be self-evident that they can acquire self-evidence among us as a people.[p47]
Arendt’s analysis suggests that the moral security that comes along with a notion of rights as natural possessions may be blinding us to reality. A more political conception of rights spurs us in contrast to grapple more fully with, and better politically address, the reality of human beings losing rights that supposedly make them human. [p48]
In Locke’s words, for example, the state of nature is a state of “perfect freedom” and “equality.” Consequently, natural rights theorists assume, as Arendt puts it, that the “dignity [rights] bestow should remain valid and real even if only a single human being existed on earth,” and “even if a human being is expelled from the human community.” [p49] ... The problem with this image of the self as naturally intact, free, and equal is that it makes it difficult to apprehend why or how individuals who no longer belong to a polity experience a specific kind of deprivation: a deprivation of an equality they can actually only possess when in some kind of political community with others.... Further, viewing the self as naturally possessing rights leads us to try to assure our rights primarily by protecting the self from others, or attempting to render it invulnerable, rather than opening our selves to the risks and contingencies of the political action and institution-building that will actually create and sustain the status of rights-bearing individuals.... she also notes that the nation-state’s alignment of rights with nationality means that ethnic or national minorities—like Jews, African Americans, Palestinians in Israel, Muslims living in European nation-states—will always be suspicious figures whose citizenship status (and hence their status as rights-bearing individuals) will always be insecure. [p50]
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt invokes the state of nature ... “Inside the civilized world, in which we normally live and which within our century has extended itself over the whole earth,” she writes, “the state of nature … is embodied in the stateless and rightless, who, as they have been expelled from all human communities, are thrown back on their natural givenness, and on it only.” Whereas for early modern political theorists the state of nature was generally admitted to be a fiction, Arendt knows that the state of nature is in our time all too real for millions of people. Her analysis of the predicament of fundamental rightlessness, however, serves the same function as the state of nature did for earlier political theorists: it was a platform on which to pose questions about the principles on which political community should be formed and, in doing so, envision the construction of polities more just than those that presently exist. [p95]
... rights might be held by individuals, but they are also constitutively relational: in order for individuals to be able to have even one right, others, organized in a political community, must recognize, respect, and enforce it. [p85] This does not happen, however, when Individuals who, by virtue of their community membership, have rights are themselves victims of a certain phenomenological violence that contours their perception of the subjects of rights. For them, the rightless are simply deleted from reality as subjects of rights. [p85]
Arendt’s very invention of the “right to have rights” should be understood not merely as a theoretical gesture, but also as an active attempt to intervene in the situation of refugees, by bringing into focus, and critically contesting, the conditions that make possible their exclusion from political community. Chief among these conditions is the sovereign right that nation-states claim to choose who their permanent residents and citizens will be, a right popularly expressed in the assertion, “We have a right to decide who we want to live with.” In the face of the arrogant proclamation by nation-states that this right is absolute, Arendt’s declaration posits a counter-right: the right of noncitizens to be members of a functioning political community... The purchase of the right to have rights is even greater when we understand that the right, claimed by nation-states, to decide who it will recognize as subjects of rights is often exercised in a manner that makes plain its subjection to the force of ideologies that hold that the people who comprise the nation be ethnically and even racially homogeneous. [p90]
Individual asylum seekers are vetted as though refugee status is a privilege and not a lawful entitlement, treated as undesirables taking advantage of a liberal system as opposed to victims with genuine claims to international protection. Similarly, no matter how desperate the situation that spurred them to forsake everything they knew, migrants are pilloried for stealing jobs and sponging off finite social benefits, even though immigrants actually expand the productive resources of a society (particularly in places where populations are aging and there is a dearth of young workers). If ours is an “age of rights,” as some scholars maintain, it remains one in principle more than reality. Rightlessness in Arendt’s more expansive sense of the term—as a condition that effectively nullifies the fragile rights that individuals formally possess—persists. [p106]
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, oppressed groups successfully fought for inclusion within a political body that forcefully excluded them. Slaves, free black citizens, indigenous people, women, and the disabled have all had to fight for basic recognition as members of the rights-holding community. (Nonhuman animals, as Alastair Hunt argues, may be next, with the help of human allies.) Oppressed people claimed rights by political mobilization, through variations on the voluntary associations and techniques of civil disobedience that Arendt eloquently championed. As a consequence of vibrant, confrontational twentieth-century social movements, we have more rights than our predecessors, at least according to the letter of the law, and this is undoubtedly something to cheer. [p101]
Arendt calls us to see and hear rights claims not as assertions of rights that individuals already possess and merely need to be respected by existing institutions. Rather, she calls us to hear rights claims as part of a political project working to create a world where rights claiming is possible for everyone. [p46]
Most shocking is the degree to which people seem not to be shocked. We are watching our rights being stripped from us and cannot raise a whimper of protest. What this book suggests is that we cannot assume our humanity will secure any rights whatever. We will only enjoy the rights we are prepared to work for. The rights we have can be taken from us.
The rest of this review is in direct quotes.
“ Arendt cites John Hope Simpson in a footnote: “The problem of statelessness became prominent after the Great War. Before the war, provisions existed in some countries, notably the United States, under which naturalization could be revoked in those cases in which the naturalized person ceased to maintain a genuine attachment to his adopted country. A person so denaturalized became stateless. During the war, the principal European States found it necessary to amend their laws of nationality so as to take power to cancel naturalization.” [p119 footnote] In 1933, the basic concept of the “right to have rights” was articulated by another Jewish European immigrant to America, Emma Goldman, after being stripped of her American citizenship and then deported for her anarchist activism. However, Goldman never used the exact phrase.[p116]
... in the decades after World War I, ... millions of people were suddenly living in European countries without claiming citizenship to any of them. Such people fell into two, often overlapping groups: “national minorities” and “stateless persons.”... “the stateless,” were both functionally and formally not citizens of any country. Indeed, they had been stripped of any citizenship they had possessed through governmental acts of mass denationalization. Among those affected were people from Spain, Turkey, Hungary, and Germany—including Arendt herself. [p12]
Arendt identifies nationalism and racism as responsible for placing such pressure on the legal institutions comprising the state that it ceased to fulfil its traditional task, “the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality,” and began to “grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the community by right of origin and fact of birth.” [p134] “In Chapter 9 of Origins she herself argues that “national minorities” living in the new countries formed out of the Austro-Hungarian empires and Czarist empires were de jure citizens but de facto non-citizens, since the institutions that were supposed to enforce their formal rights were functionally useless. [p129] ... No longer belonging to any nation-state, these people were “human and nothing but human.”[p12]...
To this day, human rights are said to be intrinsic to the very existence of human beings, regardless of nationality, gender, language, religion, ethnicity, or any other specific status. Since they are thought to be secured by the idea of humanity as such and not bestowed by an earthly power, they cannot, or so the theory goes, be taken away by any earthly power... Indeed, the three historical statements of human rights—the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—all boldly assert these rights to be “inalienable.” When all else is lost, human rights are what humans fall back on as a natural birthright. [p12]
Benhabib is a modern student of Arendt who argues that 'even if the right of all human beings to have rights is not already a reality on the ground, it is... a regulative ideal that the most powerful actors in national and international politics are now forced to negotiate. National sovereignty, in other words, is increasingly constrained by international legal norms.... Changes in international law and politics since the publication of Origins, she contends, have created a forum above the level of the nation-state in which the rights of human beings who are not citizens can be asserted and enforced with increasing effectiveness. Principal among these developments are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (both 1976), as well as the institutions of compliance and monitoring that accompanied them, such as the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights and on Refugees and the European Court of Human Rights. [p19]
But far from finding any relief in their human rights, the minorities and stateless people in Europe who lacked citizenship, appearing to others to be purely human, were exposed to extreme forms of violence. Being human, as opposed to being a citizen, certainly did not save six million Jews from being killed by the Nazis. On the contrary, as Arendt emphasizes, the Nazis challenged the Jews’ most basic of all so-called human rights, the “right to live,” only after carefully turning them into human beings by depriving them of “all legal status” in the eyes of any government. “The world,” she writes with chilling understatement, “found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” [p13]
That Arendt was able to leave war-entrenched Europe, for example, had nothing to do with her humanity or the intercession of any concerned government: it was circumstance and accident. Whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which appeared in 1948 in response to these events, proclaimed that human beings have rights simply by virtue of being human, Arendt knew firsthand that in order to have rights, individuals must be more than mere human beings. They must be members of a political community. ... Hence, Arendt declared that before there can be any specific civil, political, or social rights, there must be such a thing as a “right to have rights. [p8]
To a considerable extent her criticism was also articulated by the famous opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who already in the eighteenth century dismissed human rights (or “the rights of man” as they were still called then) as a theoretical abstraction. Against “the rights of man” he affirmed “the rights of Englishmen,” which he described as “an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom,” and not to human beings in general. Burke’s insight here is, in Arendt’s words, that “rights materialize only within a given political community, that they depend on our fellow-men and on a tacit guarantee that the members of a community give to each other.” For this reason, she says, Burke displayed “pragmatic soundness” in expressing his preference for the rights of citizens over human rights. [p82]
As the scholar Ayten Gündoğdu points out, Arendt does not want “to endorse [Burke’s] argument that takes political membership as a given.” Burke holds that positive, historical rights have always already rendered the Rights of Man redundant....In championing the laws of civil society over natural rights, Burke presumes there is no such place as “nowhere” and that there is no such thing as mere existence outside the context of a nation... For Burke, the Rights of Man are an unnecessary accessory to citizen rights. Arendt, however, sees something worth keeping... Like Burke, Arendt understands that the primary importance of institutions is their function as the safe keeper of rights. Humanity is an impossible foundation for rights whose security depends on the protection offered by a nation-state. But unlike him, she makes her argument from the historical vantage point of someone who is witnessing the disintegration of the nation-state system, a system that was only in its infancy during the French Revolution when Burke was writing... Arendt refuses to provide an alternative authority for human rights, but neither does she resign herself to cynicism toward them. The “right to have rights” is her first and last line of defense against Burke’s conservatism. It is the only thing that prevents a wholesale slide into his cynicism about human rights as hopeless idealisms .[pp46,47]
...people who are excluded from political community have been deprived of the very status of holders of rights. Such people are not simply “unequal before the law”; rather, they have been “forced outside the pale of the law.” They have lost not just one or more of the “specific rights” that citizens normally enjoy; rather, they have lost “all rights.” Their situation is not merely the loss of rights but rather “fundamental,” “absolute,” and “complete rightlessness.” In short, they have lost the very status of “subject of rights.” [p84]
At the end of Chapter 9 in Origins Arendt is fairly clear that we cannot, with any certainty, think of “humanity” as a guarantor of human rights because it is civilized humanity that engineered rightlessness in the first place: “the danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions, which despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.”[p42] We become aware of the right to have rights, in other words, not through rational or philosophical consideration of moral norms, but instead through the concrete, political experience of a new form of oppression that took away rights we did not know we had. [p46]
In the United States, for example, it is a principle of our founding document that “all men were created equal” and that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[p46]... the truth of the natural-ness of these rights is something that “we hold” to be “self-evident.” The Declaration gives the supposedly natural possession of rights, in other words, a democratic, political grounding; it is because we hold these truths to be self-evident that they can acquire self-evidence among us as a people.[p47]
Arendt’s analysis suggests that the moral security that comes along with a notion of rights as natural possessions may be blinding us to reality. A more political conception of rights spurs us in contrast to grapple more fully with, and better politically address, the reality of human beings losing rights that supposedly make them human. [p48]
In Locke’s words, for example, the state of nature is a state of “perfect freedom” and “equality.” Consequently, natural rights theorists assume, as Arendt puts it, that the “dignity [rights] bestow should remain valid and real even if only a single human being existed on earth,” and “even if a human being is expelled from the human community.” [p49] ... The problem with this image of the self as naturally intact, free, and equal is that it makes it difficult to apprehend why or how individuals who no longer belong to a polity experience a specific kind of deprivation: a deprivation of an equality they can actually only possess when in some kind of political community with others.... Further, viewing the self as naturally possessing rights leads us to try to assure our rights primarily by protecting the self from others, or attempting to render it invulnerable, rather than opening our selves to the risks and contingencies of the political action and institution-building that will actually create and sustain the status of rights-bearing individuals.... she also notes that the nation-state’s alignment of rights with nationality means that ethnic or national minorities—like Jews, African Americans, Palestinians in Israel, Muslims living in European nation-states—will always be suspicious figures whose citizenship status (and hence their status as rights-bearing individuals) will always be insecure. [p50]
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt invokes the state of nature ... “Inside the civilized world, in which we normally live and which within our century has extended itself over the whole earth,” she writes, “the state of nature … is embodied in the stateless and rightless, who, as they have been expelled from all human communities, are thrown back on their natural givenness, and on it only.” Whereas for early modern political theorists the state of nature was generally admitted to be a fiction, Arendt knows that the state of nature is in our time all too real for millions of people. Her analysis of the predicament of fundamental rightlessness, however, serves the same function as the state of nature did for earlier political theorists: it was a platform on which to pose questions about the principles on which political community should be formed and, in doing so, envision the construction of polities more just than those that presently exist. [p95]
... rights might be held by individuals, but they are also constitutively relational: in order for individuals to be able to have even one right, others, organized in a political community, must recognize, respect, and enforce it. [p85] This does not happen, however, when Individuals who, by virtue of their community membership, have rights are themselves victims of a certain phenomenological violence that contours their perception of the subjects of rights. For them, the rightless are simply deleted from reality as subjects of rights. [p85]
Arendt’s very invention of the “right to have rights” should be understood not merely as a theoretical gesture, but also as an active attempt to intervene in the situation of refugees, by bringing into focus, and critically contesting, the conditions that make possible their exclusion from political community. Chief among these conditions is the sovereign right that nation-states claim to choose who their permanent residents and citizens will be, a right popularly expressed in the assertion, “We have a right to decide who we want to live with.” In the face of the arrogant proclamation by nation-states that this right is absolute, Arendt’s declaration posits a counter-right: the right of noncitizens to be members of a functioning political community... The purchase of the right to have rights is even greater when we understand that the right, claimed by nation-states, to decide who it will recognize as subjects of rights is often exercised in a manner that makes plain its subjection to the force of ideologies that hold that the people who comprise the nation be ethnically and even racially homogeneous. [p90]
Individual asylum seekers are vetted as though refugee status is a privilege and not a lawful entitlement, treated as undesirables taking advantage of a liberal system as opposed to victims with genuine claims to international protection. Similarly, no matter how desperate the situation that spurred them to forsake everything they knew, migrants are pilloried for stealing jobs and sponging off finite social benefits, even though immigrants actually expand the productive resources of a society (particularly in places where populations are aging and there is a dearth of young workers). If ours is an “age of rights,” as some scholars maintain, it remains one in principle more than reality. Rightlessness in Arendt’s more expansive sense of the term—as a condition that effectively nullifies the fragile rights that individuals formally possess—persists. [p106]
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, oppressed groups successfully fought for inclusion within a political body that forcefully excluded them. Slaves, free black citizens, indigenous people, women, and the disabled have all had to fight for basic recognition as members of the rights-holding community. (Nonhuman animals, as Alastair Hunt argues, may be next, with the help of human allies.) Oppressed people claimed rights by political mobilization, through variations on the voluntary associations and techniques of civil disobedience that Arendt eloquently championed. As a consequence of vibrant, confrontational twentieth-century social movements, we have more rights than our predecessors, at least according to the letter of the law, and this is undoubtedly something to cheer. [p101]
Arendt calls us to see and hear rights claims not as assertions of rights that individuals already possess and merely need to be respected by existing institutions. Rather, she calls us to hear rights claims as part of a political project working to create a world where rights claiming is possible for everyone. [p46]
March 5, 2021
Read this as a small primer to questions I have around human rights. But this isn't a human rights book; it's a critique of human rights, arguing against the idea that human beings/nature is an inherent quality of the 'right' 'to have' 'rights' as according to the popularly debated phrase by Hannah Arendt.
I strongly urge friends to read this in order to question for themselves who creates human rights, and also who the subject of rights are assumed to be.
An intriguing question that may/may not get people to read this book is the question addressed: what do human rights and racism have in common? Plunge into the book and find out!
I strongly urge friends to read this in order to question for themselves who creates human rights, and also who the subject of rights are assumed to be.
An intriguing question that may/may not get people to read this book is the question addressed: what do human rights and racism have in common? Plunge into the book and find out!
August 10, 2021
کتابی که از حق میگوید و حق دارد که توسط ما انسانها خوانده شود. زندگی آدمی، با مسالهی "حق و حقوق" پیوند جاودانه دارد. تاریخ شاهد و گواهی است که نشان میدهد انسان همواره در سرتاسر تاریخِ خود، در مقابل دو امر مهم قرار گرفته: ابتدا ازدستدادنِ حق و حقوق خویش و دیگر بار تلاش در جهتِ بازپسگیریِ آن. هیچ دورهای از تاریخ را نمیتوان یافت که در آن انسان، از خطرِ بزرگِ "بیحقی" در رنج نبوده باشد.
از اینرو این کتاب، مجموعهای ارزشمند است که به دست چند تن از محققان و متفکرین برجستهی تئوری سیاسی گردآوری شده. چارچوب مباحث عمدتا ساختارشکن و رادیکال است. تحولات سیاست در غرب و ظهور مکاتب نولیبرال و نومحافظهکار و مبانی فکری و نحوهی پیشبرد اهداف این مکاتب در عمل، با دیدی ساختارشکنانه مورد مطالعه قرار میگیرد. کتابی است در نقد حقوق بشر، که بیان میدارد اساسا مفهومِ حقوق بشر انسجام لازم را جهت اینکه مبنایی برای نظریهی سیاسیِ دموکراتیک باشد ندارد؛ و در عین حال کوشش میکند اصول و منابعی را برای تلاشهای دموکراتیک بپروراند.
از اینرو این کتاب، مجموعهای ارزشمند است که به دست چند تن از محققان و متفکرین برجستهی تئوری سیاسی گردآوری شده. چارچوب مباحث عمدتا ساختارشکن و رادیکال است. تحولات سیاست در غرب و ظهور مکاتب نولیبرال و نومحافظهکار و مبانی فکری و نحوهی پیشبرد اهداف این مکاتب در عمل، با دیدی ساختارشکنانه مورد مطالعه قرار میگیرد. کتابی است در نقد حقوق بشر، که بیان میدارد اساسا مفهومِ حقوق بشر انسجام لازم را جهت اینکه مبنایی برای نظریهی سیاسیِ دموکراتیک باشد ندارد؛ و در عین حال کوشش میکند اصول و منابعی را برای تلاشهای دموکراتیک بپروراند.
February 21, 2019
An important analysis of Rights on the back Arendt
November 29, 2018
I feel like listening to a discussion I kind of can’t really follow.
‘The Right to have Rights’ - A Hannah Arendt phrase, used first in a 1949 article and again in the 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” has been subject to a series of interpretations in the last few years. There are entire careers built on this phrase, and well, this book (VERSO, 2018) with essays to find interpretations of ‘the right to have rights’ that could inform and inspire resistance to the current worldwide assault on human rights.
(On a personal note, the world has become such as mess – or maybe after living in Afghanistan and Ethiopia I became more aware of it and it’s always been a mess – that I don’t have time for academic navel gazing and niche projects; I am glad they are there and would always defend public funding for these to exist, I am glad there’s, apparently, a whole conference room of Arendt scholars who devote their entire professional lives to making sense of this phrase but I need some answers, guys!)
So, a few take-aways:
1. The context of Arendt’s writing is the holocaust and how people lost their ‘human rights’ to live at exactly the moment when they were reduced to ‘humans only’ following the Nazis’ denationalization of Jews. (This is what Agamben refers to as ‘homo sacer’, the ‘bare life’. He describes the camp as a place realized wherever bare life is produced). She describes the idea that human rights are somehow natural or innate as a biopolitical phantasy – people are not born with rights
2. So what is the right to have rights? For Arendt, more or less, the right to have rights is a “place in the world that makes opinions significant and actions effective”. Belonging to some kind of polity that grants people the right to have rights, the latter, plural ‘rights’ would then be the ‘human rights’ which keep expanding to include social and economic rights (not for Arendt though), cultural rights etc.
3. So this definition opens a whole can of worms, philosophically and politically speaking. Not going there now but focusing on some implications for today’s bare lives, most notably the 65 million or so refugees and displaced (including 10 million or so actual stateless) but also those who are formally members of a ‘polity’ through citizenship but who are not living in a political community that makes their opinions significant and actions effective (dictatorships, failed states, oligarchies etc.)
4. The kind of failure (or lack of political will) to address the rightlessness of the global stateless, displaced or any other group of people without the right to have rights resulted in a transition from human rights to humanitarianism. We see this most clearly in the depoliticized charity-like response to refugees: camps, tents, hand-outs, vaccinations and abstract references to their ‘human rights’ (as bare humans) rather than as people with political rights and members of the political community. The refugees are expected to be morally flawless people who are thankful for a blanket and a daily hot meal (that’s why the criminal refugees have to go! Didn’t show any gratitude, exploited our benevolence) The idea of refugees demanding rights and participating in the decision making process that affects them most is fairly absent. They are not part of the body politic.
5. The emptiness of the human rights concept becomes clear as we let people drown or die rather than providing them with a safe passage because there’s a massive elephant in the room. The ideal type asylum seeker – Afghan or Iranian doctor family of the 1970s or other intellectuals fleeing autocratic, ideally communist, regimes does not exist. These days, these people get skilled migrant visas to the US, Canada or Australia. Following decades of globalization that left billions of people living in poverty plus the war on terror destabilization of the greater middle east and parts of Africa has provided an entirely different group of people willing to risk their lives to leave their countries. The so-called distinction between ‘economic migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ is based on flawed division between the political and non-political circumstances (abject poverty) – all of these people have lost or never had their ‘right to have rights’ decent work, education, water are human rights, liberals are not getting tired of this mantra but then, yeah, hundreds of million or probably more people have their fundamental human rights denied because of political circumstances. This is a result of the contradictions of imperialism: having a well fortressed elite enjoying the blessings of the 21st century and hundreds of millions who also want to live in dignity. We cannot address this contradiction through migration schemes and ever more clever definitions of who is a real refugee and who just wants human dignity. We know that of course, hence we’re militarizing the borders, pushing closer into the third world to keep this from the eyes of the liberal elite who hashtag marches for an ‘open and multicultural’ world, meaning another favorite Afghan restaurant in their gentrified neighborhood.
6. So neither building a wall nor open border rhetoric while militarizing borders will get us anywhere. Migration schemes that seek to attract the few skilled workers left in the third world while complaining about the lack of higher skilled professionals in the third world (lol) is the most cynical of proposals, unsurprisingly a favorite with the liberals if the language is ‘human rights based’ enough.
7. The elephant in the room: my Ethiopian middle class friends get a Schengen visa within a week’s time and travel on a USD 550 ticket to Europe. Those Ethiopians who have no future here and whose human rights are violated from the day they were born in a shitty mud hut have to pay USD 10,000 to traffickers and may or may not make it alive through the desert and sea to Europe to end up in a camp. In a just world, the opposite would be the case or at least all of them could board the USD 550 plane. Is this what the ‘open border’ people ask for? Or do they only mean the ‘political refugees’ thereby knowingly leaving the other hundreds of million to drown? The ‘open border’ approach is a cynical lie and a distraction which I don’t support – we must make visible the militarization of Europe’s border as a consequence of a world in which we continue to dehumanize half the population through poverty and exploitation for the benefit of global elites, including those in the global south aka imperialism.
8. The irony, as always, is that the bottom in the north feels most threated by the bottom in the south, both losers of the same old and new imperialism. The liberals lecturing the right wingers on their lack of appreciation of multiculturalism while also keeping out the migrants and supporting each and every military intervention to destabilize ever more parts of the world is kind of funny to watch from the outside, if it wasn’t so tragic.
9. There’s also an episode on the book ‘the right to have rights’ on The Dig podcast, I think I enjoyed it more than the book (except for the afterword which was really good). Also: I like the way Americans pronounce Arendt.
‘The Right to have Rights’ - A Hannah Arendt phrase, used first in a 1949 article and again in the 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” has been subject to a series of interpretations in the last few years. There are entire careers built on this phrase, and well, this book (VERSO, 2018) with essays to find interpretations of ‘the right to have rights’ that could inform and inspire resistance to the current worldwide assault on human rights.
(On a personal note, the world has become such as mess – or maybe after living in Afghanistan and Ethiopia I became more aware of it and it’s always been a mess – that I don’t have time for academic navel gazing and niche projects; I am glad they are there and would always defend public funding for these to exist, I am glad there’s, apparently, a whole conference room of Arendt scholars who devote their entire professional lives to making sense of this phrase but I need some answers, guys!)
So, a few take-aways:
1. The context of Arendt’s writing is the holocaust and how people lost their ‘human rights’ to live at exactly the moment when they were reduced to ‘humans only’ following the Nazis’ denationalization of Jews. (This is what Agamben refers to as ‘homo sacer’, the ‘bare life’. He describes the camp as a place realized wherever bare life is produced). She describes the idea that human rights are somehow natural or innate as a biopolitical phantasy – people are not born with rights
2. So what is the right to have rights? For Arendt, more or less, the right to have rights is a “place in the world that makes opinions significant and actions effective”. Belonging to some kind of polity that grants people the right to have rights, the latter, plural ‘rights’ would then be the ‘human rights’ which keep expanding to include social and economic rights (not for Arendt though), cultural rights etc.
3. So this definition opens a whole can of worms, philosophically and politically speaking. Not going there now but focusing on some implications for today’s bare lives, most notably the 65 million or so refugees and displaced (including 10 million or so actual stateless) but also those who are formally members of a ‘polity’ through citizenship but who are not living in a political community that makes their opinions significant and actions effective (dictatorships, failed states, oligarchies etc.)
4. The kind of failure (or lack of political will) to address the rightlessness of the global stateless, displaced or any other group of people without the right to have rights resulted in a transition from human rights to humanitarianism. We see this most clearly in the depoliticized charity-like response to refugees: camps, tents, hand-outs, vaccinations and abstract references to their ‘human rights’ (as bare humans) rather than as people with political rights and members of the political community. The refugees are expected to be morally flawless people who are thankful for a blanket and a daily hot meal (that’s why the criminal refugees have to go! Didn’t show any gratitude, exploited our benevolence) The idea of refugees demanding rights and participating in the decision making process that affects them most is fairly absent. They are not part of the body politic.
5. The emptiness of the human rights concept becomes clear as we let people drown or die rather than providing them with a safe passage because there’s a massive elephant in the room. The ideal type asylum seeker – Afghan or Iranian doctor family of the 1970s or other intellectuals fleeing autocratic, ideally communist, regimes does not exist. These days, these people get skilled migrant visas to the US, Canada or Australia. Following decades of globalization that left billions of people living in poverty plus the war on terror destabilization of the greater middle east and parts of Africa has provided an entirely different group of people willing to risk their lives to leave their countries. The so-called distinction between ‘economic migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ is based on flawed division between the political and non-political circumstances (abject poverty) – all of these people have lost or never had their ‘right to have rights’ decent work, education, water are human rights, liberals are not getting tired of this mantra but then, yeah, hundreds of million or probably more people have their fundamental human rights denied because of political circumstances. This is a result of the contradictions of imperialism: having a well fortressed elite enjoying the blessings of the 21st century and hundreds of millions who also want to live in dignity. We cannot address this contradiction through migration schemes and ever more clever definitions of who is a real refugee and who just wants human dignity. We know that of course, hence we’re militarizing the borders, pushing closer into the third world to keep this from the eyes of the liberal elite who hashtag marches for an ‘open and multicultural’ world, meaning another favorite Afghan restaurant in their gentrified neighborhood.
6. So neither building a wall nor open border rhetoric while militarizing borders will get us anywhere. Migration schemes that seek to attract the few skilled workers left in the third world while complaining about the lack of higher skilled professionals in the third world (lol) is the most cynical of proposals, unsurprisingly a favorite with the liberals if the language is ‘human rights based’ enough.
7. The elephant in the room: my Ethiopian middle class friends get a Schengen visa within a week’s time and travel on a USD 550 ticket to Europe. Those Ethiopians who have no future here and whose human rights are violated from the day they were born in a shitty mud hut have to pay USD 10,000 to traffickers and may or may not make it alive through the desert and sea to Europe to end up in a camp. In a just world, the opposite would be the case or at least all of them could board the USD 550 plane. Is this what the ‘open border’ people ask for? Or do they only mean the ‘political refugees’ thereby knowingly leaving the other hundreds of million to drown? The ‘open border’ approach is a cynical lie and a distraction which I don’t support – we must make visible the militarization of Europe’s border as a consequence of a world in which we continue to dehumanize half the population through poverty and exploitation for the benefit of global elites, including those in the global south aka imperialism.
8. The irony, as always, is that the bottom in the north feels most threated by the bottom in the south, both losers of the same old and new imperialism. The liberals lecturing the right wingers on their lack of appreciation of multiculturalism while also keeping out the migrants and supporting each and every military intervention to destabilize ever more parts of the world is kind of funny to watch from the outside, if it wasn’t so tragic.
9. There’s also an episode on the book ‘the right to have rights’ on The Dig podcast, I think I enjoyed it more than the book (except for the afterword which was really good). Also: I like the way Americans pronounce Arendt.
January 19, 2025
کتاب در چند مقاله به واکاویِ جز به جز جمله : " حق برخورداری از حقوق" هانا آرنت پرداخته بود.
نقدِ آرنت به "حقوق بشر" سرِ اینه که "حقوق" صرفا برایِ شهروندانِ یک سیستمِ سیاسی قابلِ احقاقه و افرادِ سلب تابعیت شده یا جمعیت هایِ به رسمیت شناخته نشده توسط نظمِ سیاسی هیچ دست آویزی برای طلب حقشون ندارن و این بیانیه حقوق بشر رو به متنی بی استفاده تبدیل میکنه.
تو مقاله هایِ اول و دوم مسأله حق داشتن در گزاره "حق برخورداری از حقوق" رو با ارجاع به آرنت پژوهانی مثلِ سیلا بن حبیب به عنوان بنیانی اخلاقی و جهانشمول و متعلق به یکایک افراد بشر به صرفِ انسان بودن تفسیر میکنن ولی مقاله چهارم نوشته آلیستر هانت همین بنیانِ کرامت ذاتی انسان رو مبنایی فاشیستی و نژاد پرستانه میدونه چون ریشه اش اینه که افراد صرفا از طریق تولد در یک نژاد صاحب حق میشن و این انحصار نژادی دست کم درباره حقوقِ موجوداتِ ناانسان سکوت میکنه یا حصری حقوقی برای خودش قائل میشه چنانکه تو صفحه صد و بیست و شش میگه:
"هانا آرنت با تحلیل زیست-سیاسی حقوق بشر درسی مهم به ما میدهد: عضویت در جامعه انسانی نباید نقشی تعیین کننده در شمول حق برخورداری از حقوق داشته باشد."
اثر به طور کلی تمرکزش رویِ هانا آرنته و این هم به خاطر ابداعِ مفهومي ای هست که آرنت دست به آفرینشش زده و از این رویکرد کتاب که هر مقاله به صورت جزئی و موشکافانه به واژه واژه جمله تاریخیِ آرنت میپرداخت خوشم اومد و فکر میکنم این کتاب برایِ مساله برانگیز شدنِ مفاهیمی مانند حق و چگونگی فهم ما از دارایِ حق شدن و حد و حدودِ دارا بودن حق و حتی معنایِ خودِ داراییِ حق میتونه راهگشا باشه.
نقدِ آرنت به "حقوق بشر" سرِ اینه که "حقوق" صرفا برایِ شهروندانِ یک سیستمِ سیاسی قابلِ احقاقه و افرادِ سلب تابعیت شده یا جمعیت هایِ به رسمیت شناخته نشده توسط نظمِ سیاسی هیچ دست آویزی برای طلب حقشون ندارن و این بیانیه حقوق بشر رو به متنی بی استفاده تبدیل میکنه.
تو مقاله هایِ اول و دوم مسأله حق داشتن در گزاره "حق برخورداری از حقوق" رو با ارجاع به آرنت پژوهانی مثلِ سیلا بن حبیب به عنوان بنیانی اخلاقی و جهانشمول و متعلق به یکایک افراد بشر به صرفِ انسان بودن تفسیر میکنن ولی مقاله چهارم نوشته آلیستر هانت همین بنیانِ کرامت ذاتی انسان رو مبنایی فاشیستی و نژاد پرستانه میدونه چون ریشه اش اینه که افراد صرفا از طریق تولد در یک نژاد صاحب حق میشن و این انحصار نژادی دست کم درباره حقوقِ موجوداتِ ناانسان سکوت میکنه یا حصری حقوقی برای خودش قائل میشه چنانکه تو صفحه صد و بیست و شش میگه:
"هانا آرنت با تحلیل زیست-سیاسی حقوق بشر درسی مهم به ما میدهد: عضویت در جامعه انسانی نباید نقشی تعیین کننده در شمول حق برخورداری از حقوق داشته باشد."
اثر به طور کلی تمرکزش رویِ هانا آرنته و این هم به خاطر ابداعِ مفهومي ای هست که آرنت دست به آفرینشش زده و از این رویکرد کتاب که هر مقاله به صورت جزئی و موشکافانه به واژه واژه جمله تاریخیِ آرنت میپرداخت خوشم اومد و فکر میکنم این کتاب برایِ مساله برانگیز شدنِ مفاهیمی مانند حق و چگونگی فهم ما از دارایِ حق شدن و حد و حدودِ دارا بودن حق و حتی معنایِ خودِ داراییِ حق میتونه راهگشا باشه.
September 11, 2024
۱
حقِّ حق داشتن، بدیل انتقادی هانا آرنت در برابر مفهومِ ناکارآمد حقوقِ بشر است. آرنت این مفهوم را برای نخستین بار در مقالهای با عنوان "حقوق بشر: کدام حقوق؟ - ۱۹۴۹" به کار بست و چند سال بعد آن را به شکلی شفافتر اما با ناامیدی و یاس بیشتری _که خود این وضعیت را، آرمانگراییِ نومیدانه مینامید_ در کتاب "ریشههای تمامیتخواهی" شرح داد. حقّ حق داشتن به زعم آرنت، نه از سنخ آن دست حقوقیست که انسان فیالذاته به صرف انسان بودنش واجد آن باشد و نه ثمرهی شهروندی یک دولت ملیست. به عبارتی دیگر، این حق بنا بر پیشینهی تاریخیاش، نه یک داشتهی طبیعیست که همگان به طور برابر از آن برخوردار باشیم و نه موهبتیست از سوی دولت؛ بلکه حقیست که با جدال و در برابر موانع سخت باید گرفته شود. آرنت به ما میگوید که تنها زمانی میتوان از حقّ حق داشتن صحبت به میان آورد که به طریقی آن را از دست داده باشیم. در واقع، تنها در وضعیت بیحقی مطلق است که ما مفهوم حقّ حق داشتن را یکسره درمییابیم. بیحقی، وضعیتیست که در آن اشخاص بیحق دیگر کوچکترین تعلقی به هیچ جامعهای ندارند که بتوانند حق خود را در بستر آن اجتماع مطالبه کند.
۲
شرح و بسط این مفهوم انتقادی توسط آرنت، از خلال حاشیهنویسی او بر آرای تند و تیز ادموند بُرک علیه ایدهآل حقوق بشر در اعلامیهی "حقوق بشر و حق شهروندیِ" انقلاب کبیر فرانسه صورت میگیرد. نویسندگان آن اعلامیه بر این باور بودند که انسان به صرف آن که انسان است_انسان بماهو انسان_ واجد حقوقی طبیعیست که ماورای نژاد و ملیت هر فرد در قبال او صدق میکند. اما برک این مدعا را نوعی خوشباوری تحققناپذیر میدانست. چرا که تجربهی زیستهی او حامل این واقعیت سیاسی بود که شهروندی و یا برخورداری از تابعیت سیاسی یک کشور، به مراتب تضمین بیشتری برای حقوق فردی به همراه دارد تا یک مفهوم مجرد جهانشمول به نام حقوق بشر [ کما که آرنت نیز باور داشت دنیا هیچ چیز مقدسی در صرف انسان بودن نمیبیند ]. به زعم برک، هر گونه حق انسانی تنها به شرطِ شهروندی در یک دولت سیاسی مشروعیت مییابد و تمامی مفاهیم حقوقی جهانشمول، در برابر قوانین آن دولت، وادار به تسلیم میشوند. به عبارتی، حقوق ملی تنها حقوق قانونیست که به منظور تامین امنیت و آسایش افراد قابل استناد است. برک میگوید مفهوم انتزاعی حقوق بشر یا حق جهانشمول طبیعی هر انسان، به همان میزان بیمعناست که "انسانِ انتزاعی" و "شهروندِ هیچ کجا". و این انسان انتزاعی یا شهروند هیچ کجا بودن نقطهی جدایی آرای آرنت از برک است.
۳
تجربهی دو جنگ جهانی و بحران بیخانمانها و پناهجویانی که دیگر نه وطنی برای بازگشت داشتند و نه خاک دیگری پذیرای حضور آنان بود، به آرنت نشان داد که برخلاف اظهارات برک، انسان چگونه بدل به امری مجرد و انتزاعی و شهروند، چگونه ساکنِ هیچ کجا میشود. آرنت به وضوح میدید که نه شهروندی و تابعیت قانونیِ یک کشور و نه ملیت و نژاد، دیگر نمیتوانند ضامن مطمئنی برای حقوق اولیهی انسانها باشند. برای مثال، تصویب قوانین ضدیهودی نورنبرگ در آلمان نازی، نمایانگر این بود که یک حاکمیت تمامیتخواه میتواند با نوعی اقلیتسازیِ دلبخواهی، به سادگی حقوق شهروندی را برای عدهای از مردم ملغا کند. همچنین سلب تابعیت قانونی پناهجویان در پی تشنجهای سیاسی و یا بحرانهای داخلی و خارجی یک کشور، گواهیست بر ماهیت غیرقابل اطمینان شهروندیِ اکتسابی. بنا به تاویلی کلیتر، میتوان بیاعتمادی و بدبینی آرنت را به کلیت ساختار دولت نسبت داد. چه آرنت و چه مفسرین آرای او در کتاب "حقِ حق داشتن"، به طور آشکار و یا تلویحی در خصوص افزایش روزافزونِ خودآیینی دولتها و استقلال خواستِ آنها از خواست مردم، اعلام خطر میکنند. نویسندگان کتاب با ذکر نمونههای متعدد، یادآور میشوند که دولتها تا چه حد در تصمیماتشان نه تنها در راستای خواست مردم قدم برنداشتهاند، بلکه با اتکا بر سلطهی بوروکراتیک و یا قدرت نظامیشان، خواست خود را بر مردم تحمیل کرده و میکنند.
۴
پرسشی که در چنین وضعیتی مطرح میشود آن است که تکلیف مردم در برابر قوانینی که بدون رضایتشان تصویب و بر آنها تحمیل میشود چیست؟ آرنت در مسئلهسازیِ موقعیت یادشده، به درستی اشاره میکند که اگرچه تکلیف اخلاقی شهروندان، اطاعت از قوانین است اما این حکم خود مشروط بر این است که آن قوانین، همسو با خواست مردم و یا این که قوهی مقننه در اختیار مردم باشد. بنابراین، محرومیت و بیحقی مردم از یک سو و خودداری متولیان سیاست از سهیم کردن مردم در وضع قوانین و مقررات حاکم بر زندگیمان از سوی دیگر، نه تنها عدم التزام ما به آن قوانین را توجیه میکند، بلکه به ما حق مقاومت کامل در برابر آن قوانین را نیز میدهد.
از همین رو این کتاب فراخوانیست به کوششهای مستمرِ مردمنهاد در جهت به چنگ آوردن حقوق سلبشدهشان توسط نهاد حاکمیت. فراخوانیست برای گردآوری نیروهای موسس و ضد سلطه در اقالیم و فضاهایی خارج از حدود کنترلی دولت. فراخوانیست خطاب به ما مردمی که در زادگاه خود به سمت نوعی بیخانمانی سیاسی میرویم، چرا که آرام آرام به لحاظ سیاسی به موجوداتی زائد برای حاکمیت مطلقه تبدیل میشویم: عقیمِ سیاسی. و از آن رو که طبعا هنوز کاملا به این نقطه نرسیدهایم، شاید امیدی به نجات باشد.
حقِّ حق داشتن، بدیل انتقادی هانا آرنت در برابر مفهومِ ناکارآمد حقوقِ بشر است. آرنت این مفهوم را برای نخستین بار در مقالهای با عنوان "حقوق بشر: کدام حقوق؟ - ۱۹۴۹" به کار بست و چند سال بعد آن را به شکلی شفافتر اما با ناامیدی و یاس بیشتری _که خود این وضعیت را، آرمانگراییِ نومیدانه مینامید_ در کتاب "ریشههای تمامیتخواهی" شرح داد. حقّ حق داشتن به زعم آرنت، نه از سنخ آن دست حقوقیست که انسان فیالذاته به صرف انسان بودنش واجد آن باشد و نه ثمرهی شهروندی یک دولت ملیست. به عبارتی دیگر، این حق بنا بر پیشینهی تاریخیاش، نه یک داشتهی طبیعیست که همگان به طور برابر از آن برخوردار باشیم و نه موهبتیست از سوی دولت؛ بلکه حقیست که با جدال و در برابر موانع سخت باید گرفته شود. آرنت به ما میگوید که تنها زمانی میتوان از حقّ حق داشتن صحبت به میان آورد که به طریقی آن را از دست داده باشیم. در واقع، تنها در وضعیت بیحقی مطلق است که ما مفهوم حقّ حق داشتن را یکسره درمییابیم. بیحقی، وضعیتیست که در آن اشخاص بیحق دیگر کوچکترین تعلقی به هیچ جامعهای ندارند که بتوانند حق خود را در بستر آن اجتماع مطالبه کند.
۲
شرح و بسط این مفهوم انتقادی توسط آرنت، از خلال حاشیهنویسی او بر آرای تند و تیز ادموند بُرک علیه ایدهآل حقوق بشر در اعلامیهی "حقوق بشر و حق شهروندیِ" انقلاب کبیر فرانسه صورت میگیرد. نویسندگان آن اعلامیه بر این باور بودند که انسان به صرف آن که انسان است_انسان بماهو انسان_ واجد حقوقی طبیعیست که ماورای نژاد و ملیت هر فرد در قبال او صدق میکند. اما برک این مدعا را نوعی خوشباوری تحققناپذیر میدانست. چرا که تجربهی زیستهی او حامل این واقعیت سیاسی بود که شهروندی و یا برخورداری از تابعیت سیاسی یک کشور، به مراتب تضمین بیشتری برای حقوق فردی به همراه دارد تا یک مفهوم مجرد جهانشمول به نام حقوق بشر [ کما که آرنت نیز باور داشت دنیا هیچ چیز مقدسی در صرف انسان بودن نمیبیند ]. به زعم برک، هر گونه حق انسانی تنها به شرطِ شهروندی در یک دولت سیاسی مشروعیت مییابد و تمامی مفاهیم حقوقی جهانشمول، در برابر قوانین آن دولت، وادار به تسلیم میشوند. به عبارتی، حقوق ملی تنها حقوق قانونیست که به منظور تامین امنیت و آسایش افراد قابل استناد است. برک میگوید مفهوم انتزاعی حقوق بشر یا حق جهانشمول طبیعی هر انسان، به همان میزان بیمعناست که "انسانِ انتزاعی" و "شهروندِ هیچ کجا". و این انسان انتزاعی یا شهروند هیچ کجا بودن نقطهی جدایی آرای آرنت از برک است.
۳
تجربهی دو جنگ جهانی و بحران بیخانمانها و پناهجویانی که دیگر نه وطنی برای بازگشت داشتند و نه خاک دیگری پذیرای حضور آنان بود، به آرنت نشان داد که برخلاف اظهارات برک، انسان چگونه بدل به امری مجرد و انتزاعی و شهروند، چگونه ساکنِ هیچ کجا میشود. آرنت به وضوح میدید که نه شهروندی و تابعیت قانونیِ یک کشور و نه ملیت و نژاد، دیگر نمیتوانند ضامن مطمئنی برای حقوق اولیهی انسانها باشند. برای مثال، تصویب قوانین ضدیهودی نورنبرگ در آلمان نازی، نمایانگر این بود که یک حاکمیت تمامیتخواه میتواند با نوعی اقلیتسازیِ دلبخواهی، به سادگی حقوق شهروندی را برای عدهای از مردم ملغا کند. همچنین سلب تابعیت قانونی پناهجویان در پی تشنجهای سیاسی و یا بحرانهای داخلی و خارجی یک کشور، گواهیست بر ماهیت غیرقابل اطمینان شهروندیِ اکتسابی. بنا به تاویلی کلیتر، میتوان بیاعتمادی و بدبینی آرنت را به کلیت ساختار دولت نسبت داد. چه آرنت و چه مفسرین آرای او در کتاب "حقِ حق داشتن"، به طور آشکار و یا تلویحی در خصوص افزایش روزافزونِ خودآیینی دولتها و استقلال خواستِ آنها از خواست مردم، اعلام خطر میکنند. نویسندگان کتاب با ذکر نمونههای متعدد، یادآور میشوند که دولتها تا چه حد در تصمیماتشان نه تنها در راستای خواست مردم قدم برنداشتهاند، بلکه با اتکا بر سلطهی بوروکراتیک و یا قدرت نظامیشان، خواست خود را بر مردم تحمیل کرده و میکنند.
۴
پرسشی که در چنین وضعیتی مطرح میشود آن است که تکلیف مردم در برابر قوانینی که بدون رضایتشان تصویب و بر آنها تحمیل میشود چیست؟ آرنت در مسئلهسازیِ موقعیت یادشده، به درستی اشاره میکند که اگرچه تکلیف اخلاقی شهروندان، اطاعت از قوانین است اما این حکم خود مشروط بر این است که آن قوانین، همسو با خواست مردم و یا این که قوهی مقننه در اختیار مردم باشد. بنابراین، محرومیت و بیحقی مردم از یک سو و خودداری متولیان سیاست از سهیم کردن مردم در وضع قوانین و مقررات حاکم بر زندگیمان از سوی دیگر، نه تنها عدم التزام ما به آن قوانین را توجیه میکند، بلکه به ما حق مقاومت کامل در برابر آن قوانین را نیز میدهد.
از همین رو این کتاب فراخوانیست به کوششهای مستمرِ مردمنهاد در جهت به چنگ آوردن حقوق سلبشدهشان توسط نهاد حاکمیت. فراخوانیست برای گردآوری نیروهای موسس و ضد سلطه در اقالیم و فضاهایی خارج از حدود کنترلی دولت. فراخوانیست خطاب به ما مردمی که در زادگاه خود به سمت نوعی بیخانمانی سیاسی میرویم، چرا که آرام آرام به لحاظ سیاسی به موجوداتی زائد برای حاکمیت مطلقه تبدیل میشویم: عقیمِ سیاسی. و از آن رو که طبعا هنوز کاملا به این نقطه نرسیدهایم، شاید امیدی به نجات باشد.
December 21, 2022
تمرکز کتاب بیشتر بر روی افراد محروم، مهاجران و پناهجویان آوارهای است که به واسطهی جنگ یا تغییرات اقلیمی ناگزیر از ترک زادبوم خود شده و در کشورهای دیگر به دنبال ملجا یا پناهگاهی میگردند. در این راستا به متون اصلی در آثار هانا آرنت مراجعه شدهاست که به نقد مفهوم «حقوق بشر» میپردازد. از نظر هانا آرنت مفهوم حقوق بشر شعاری بیش نبود چراکه اقلیتها و اشخاص بیتابعیتی که در اروپا زندگی میکردند، در مقام انسان هیچگونه تکیهگاه و پناهگاهی در اصول حقوق بشر نیافتند و حتی در معرض بدترین انواع خشونت قرار گرفتند. به همین منظور آرنت مفهوم جدید «حق برخورداری از حقوق» را برای نخستین بار در کتاب «ریشههای تمامیتخواهی» اش خلق کرد. پنج نویسندهی این کتاب نیز به نقد مفهوم خلق شده توسط هانا آرنت و موشکافی لغات استفادهشده در آن پرداختهاند. متاسفانه نتوانستم با کتاب ارتباط بگیرم و نقدها برایم چیزی جز بازی با واژگان و مفاهیم نداشت. از طرفی این میزان از موشکافی در نظرم نوعی اتلاف وقت و امری بیهوده است. واژههایی که همچنان سازندهی شعاری بیش نیستند و چینش دلخواه آنها کنار هم باعث آن نمیشود که ما را به عمل نزدیک سازد یا مسئلهای را حل بکند.
اما افراد چگونه میتوانند حق برخورداری از حقوق را به مرحلهی اجرا در بیاورند؟ به گفتهی آستراتیلور تنها راهحل، اقدام جمعی است. همچنین با درک ساختارها و فساد سیاسی و اقتصادی حاکم بر جامعه نباید اجازه داد یک گروه از مردمان محروم به جان گروه دیگر بیفتد و از طرفی باید خشم هر دو گروه را متوجه بالادستیها کرد. در حال حاضر مجموع ثروت تنها هشت نفر در این دنیا برابر ثروت نیمی از جمعیت کرهی زمین است. بدیهی است این هشت نفر خطری بزرگتر برای رفاه جمعی جهان است تا ۶۵ میلیون آواره و بیخانمان.
اما افراد چگونه میتوانند حق برخورداری از حقوق را به مرحلهی اجرا در بیاورند؟ به گفتهی آستراتیلور تنها راهحل، اقدام جمعی است. همچنین با درک ساختارها و فساد سیاسی و اقتصادی حاکم بر جامعه نباید اجازه داد یک گروه از مردمان محروم به جان گروه دیگر بیفتد و از طرفی باید خشم هر دو گروه را متوجه بالادستیها کرد. در حال حاضر مجموع ثروت تنها هشت نفر در این دنیا برابر ثروت نیمی از جمعیت کرهی زمین است. بدیهی است این هشت نفر خطری بزرگتر برای رفاه جمعی جهان است تا ۶۵ میلیون آواره و بیخانمان.
March 18, 2023
اول از همه از مترجم متشکرم بابت این ترجمه خوبش.
داخل کتاب راجع به پارادوکسی صحبت میشه که حتی در عنوان و اسم کتاب هم این موضوع مشخصه.
مثلا تا حالا شده که همه مون از وجود حقی برای خودمون مطلع بشیم که اون حق رو از دست داده باشیم.
کتاب نگاهی ساختار شکنانه به موضوع حق و حقوق انسان داره و میگه کی مشخص میکنه که هرکس چه حقی داره و چجوری باید حقش رو بگیره .
پیشنهاد میکنم این کتاب رو حتما بخونید.
راستی من این کتاب رو تو نرم افزار طاقچه خوندم اگه شما هم میخواین با هزینه کمتر کتاب رو بخوانید میتونید از لینک زیر استفاده کنید:
«حقِ حقداشتن» را از طاقچه دریافت کنید
https://taaghche.com/book/54636
داخل کتاب راجع به پارادوکسی صحبت میشه که حتی در عنوان و اسم کتاب هم این موضوع مشخصه.
مثلا تا حالا شده که همه مون از وجود حقی برای خودمون مطلع بشیم که اون حق رو از دست داده باشیم.
کتاب نگاهی ساختار شکنانه به موضوع حق و حقوق انسان داره و میگه کی مشخص میکنه که هرکس چه حقی داره و چجوری باید حقش رو بگیره .
پیشنهاد میکنم این کتاب رو حتما بخونید.
راستی من این کتاب رو تو نرم افزار طاقچه خوندم اگه شما هم میخواین با هزینه کمتر کتاب رو بخوانید میتونید از لینک زیر استفاده کنید:
«حقِ حقداشتن» را از طاقچه دریافت کنید
https://taaghche.com/book/54636
May 29, 2019
انتظار مقالات بدیع تری داشتم ولی عمدتا به تفسیر نظرات هانا آرنت و نقداری هم به سایر متفکران و بررسی تاریخچه ی اینمفهوم پرداخته بودن. کتاب خیلی خلاصه ای بود و واقعا هم نمیشد بحث رو عمیقا بررسی کرد در این حجم کم. امیدوارم در آینده با این تاپیک آثار عمیق تر و دقیق تر و مفصل تری به چاپ برسه
July 12, 2020
به شخصه زیاد از کتاب لذت نبردم.
تمام کتاب صرفا حول محور جمله "حق برخورداری از حقوق" میگذره و در هر فصل کتاب یک نویسنده میاد یکی از کلمات این جمله رو تعریف میکنه.
بطور کلی کتاب بدی نیست ولی زیاده گویی و اضافه گویی درش به حدی هست که ادم رو اذیت کنه
تمام کتاب صرفا حول محور جمله "حق برخورداری از حقوق" میگذره و در هر فصل کتاب یک نویسنده میاد یکی از کلمات این جمله رو تعریف میکنه.
بطور کلی کتاب بدی نیست ولی زیاده گویی و اضافه گویی درش به حدی هست که ادم رو اذیت کنه
January 19, 2023
Lots of talking in circles. Often quite boring. Wanted to quit but felt it was too short to give up.
December 20, 2023
کتاب خوبی بود، موضوع مهمی داشت ولی تکرار توش خیلیی زیاد بود.
Read
May 8, 2025(۲۵) بهتر میبود قبل از خوندن این کتاب آثار هانا آرنت به طور کامل مطالعه شده میبود که خب من نخونده بودم و نتونستم ارتباط بگیرم.
February 13, 2021
well researched and thoroughly compelling.
their assertions are expertly made.
reading Hannah Arrendt beforehand is necessary to grasp all of the fine points,
but even the uninitiated will come out of this with a better understanding of the principals and mechanisms that allow for us to assert our rights.
their assertions are expertly made.
reading Hannah Arrendt beforehand is necessary to grasp all of the fine points,
but even the uninitiated will come out of this with a better understanding of the principals and mechanisms that allow for us to assert our rights.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 18 reviews