Hannah Arendt and Human Rights The Predicament of Common Responsibility [Paperback]

Hannah Arendts most important contribution to political thought may be her well-known and often-cited notion of the right to have rights. In this incisive and wide-ranging book, Peg Birmingham explores the theoretical and social foundations of Arendts philosophy on human rights. Devoting special consideration to questions and issues surrounding Arendts ideas of common humanity, human responsibility, and natality, Birmingham formulates a more complex view of how these basic concepts support Arendts theory of human rights. Birmingham considers Arendts key philosophical works along with her literary writings, especially those on Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, to reveal the extent of Arendts commitment to humanity even as violence, horror, and pessimism overtook Europe during World War II and its aftermath. This current and lively book makes a significant contribution to philosophy, political science, and European intellectual history.

The achievement of Birminghams book is that it situates Arendts much cited discussion of the right to have rights within the broader context of her later work. She persuasively shows that the political predicament of stateless people exemplified the problematic of modern politics with which she was implicitly preoccupied in her later work on freedom and praxis. . .Vol. 18.2 2009A new reading of Hannah Arendts philosophy of human rights Hannah Arendt and Human Rights is to demonstrate how closely Arendt's account of the human condition . . . can figure into demonstrating that the discourse on human rights is not wholly negative, not wholly an empirical upshot of the disasters of the twentieth century. The idea of human rights we now possess articlates what, plausibly, might be thought to be involved in recognizing all others as members of the human community, thereby underwriting the political structures necessary to hold the fragile framework of the conditions of humanity in place. Birmingham can thus be thoughtlC