QuestionsWhat is a just society?The right to have rights: the stateless and the failure of the rights of man
What is a just society?One humanity

The right to have rights: the stateless and the failure of the rights of man

The right to have rights

Hannah Arendt 1906 · 1975Political philosopher born in Germany, exiled to the United States: she covers the Eichmann trial and speaks of the 'banality of evil', born of a lack of thought.
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What it claims

Justice cannot stop at a state's borders: everyone's first right is to belong to humanity, and humanity as a whole must guarantee it.

Why

When one loses every political community, the 'rights of man' protect no one: first comes the right to belong to humanity.

The same idea through history
Edmund Burke1790Burke preferred the 'rights of Englishmen' to the abstract rights of man. Arendt cites him (ch. 9) to say that the experience of the stateless proved him right on one point: the bare human, with no community, is protected by nothing.
Hannah Arendt1951Arendt, herself a refugee after 1933 and stateless from 1937 to 1951, draws the lesson of the interwar years: millions of stateless people showed where the rights of man cease to exist.
In short

"The right to have rights: the stateless and the failure of the rights of man" is an argument by Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), ch. 9 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man', 1951) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: one humanity). Its claim: Justice cannot stop at a state's borders: everyone's first right is to belong to humanity, and humanity as a whole must guarantee it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), ch. 9 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man'
Valid with an implicit premise

Declarations of the rights of man say that everyone has rights because they are human. But in interwar Europe, millions of people lost their state: stateless people, refugees, expellees. Arendt notes that it was they who lost all their rights, precisely because they were nothing but human beings. In practice rights depended on belonging to a political community. Hence her conclusion: before any other right comes the right to have rights, that is, to belong to a community where one is judged by one's actions. And this right can only be guaranteed by humanity itself.

P1The stateless of the twentieth century lost all their rights by losing their state, while still being human beings: 'the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human'.
P2Their calamity is not the loss of liberty or equality before the law, but that they belong to no community at all: what they lack is a framework in which one is judged by one's actions.
P3 · implicit premiseA right that vanishes as soon as one loses political membership does not protect the human as such: membership must therefore be a first right.
P4This 'right to have rights', or right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.
Therefore justice cannot stop at a state's borders: everyone's first right is to belong to humanity, and humanity as a whole must guarantee it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Valid with P3. P1 and P2 describe what happens to the stateless. P3, hidden, draws the lesson: the basic right is membership. P4 says who must guarantee it. Points of attack: P1 (did the rights of man really 'fail', or did they need better enforcement?) and P4 (humanity is not an institution: Arendt herself admits that 'it is by no means certain whether this is possible'). Arendt does not propose a world government and distrusts it.
Analogy. A theatre ticket with no theatre: one may hold a paper saying one has a seat, but if the theatre no longer exists or refuses to let you in, the paper is useless. Before the ticket, one needs a place in the hall.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Edmund Burke 1790 · attacks the conclusion

Burke holds that the only real rights are those inherited from a particular society, the 'rights of Englishmen', and that the abstract rights of man are dangerous and powerless. This seems confirmed by the experience of the stateless, but it leads to the opposite of Arendt's conclusion: if rights come from the community, there is no universal justice.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Arendt in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Arendt grants that Burke was right about the powerlessness of abstract rights (ch. 9), but draws another consequence: everyone must be guaranteed a place in the world, so membership itself must be made universal (our reading). Burkeans answer that only a real community can protect, and an 'humanity' cannot.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Burke: rights come from the community. Arendt: precisely, everyone must be guaranteed a community. Core disagreement: can a universal guarantee be real without a world state?
S
Seyla Benhabib 2004 · attacks premise 4

Benhabib, who takes up the formula, notes that Arendt does not say what this first right rests on: she distrusts nature and history as foundations, and 'humanity' is not an institution. Benhabib proposes to understand it as everyone's moral right to be recognised as a member of a legal community, which imposes on states fair rules of admission and naturalisation without taking away their control of their borders.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 2004, after the author's death (1975).
The debate goes on (our summary) Reconstructed reply (our reading): Arendt herself grants that 'it is by no means certain whether this is possible'; her argument establishes the need for this right, not yet its foundation or the institution that would guarantee it. Benhabib completes it more than she refutes it.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Benhabib: the right to have rights needs a moral foundation and institutions. Arendt: the stateless prove the need for it. Core disagreement: where is the line between admission owed and legitimate border control?
G
Giorgio Agamben 1995 · attacks premise 4

Agamben reads Arendt's analysis as a revelation: the rights of man do not protect the 'bare' human being, they make him a mere element of the nation-state. The refugee shows the limit of this system, and politics should be thought from him, not by guaranteeing more rights in the name of humanity.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1995, after the author's death (1975).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Agamben: a guarantee by humanity reproduces the problem. Arendtian reading (reconstructed): there is no other guarantor. Core disagreement: should the idea of rights be reformed or left behind?