Hannah Arendt decline of human rights

27 Pages·2009·0.28 MB·English

by  Rodrigo Cordero

Hannah Arendt
1906-1975

analysis of totalitarianism
• reference to Nazi and Stalinist movements and
‘states’ they established
• differences between Germany and Russia, e.g.
private versus state property, superiority of
Aryan race versus dictatorship of the proletariat;
• similarities e.g. terror and ideology, mass
mobilisation, anti-state, anti-national, anti-rights,
anti-bourgeois, anti-civil society.
Meaning of ‘origins’
• ‘origins’ more like ‘elements’ than causes
– Antisemitism
– Imperialism
– Anti-imperialism
– Disillusion
– Nihilism
decline of the nation-state
• enlightened idea of state: nation defined by virtue of
common citizenship in a shared political community
• nationalist idea of state: no longer state that defines
the nation but nation that defines state
• ‘decline of the nation-state’: transformation of state
from instrument of law to instrument of nation
decline of the nation-state
• collapse of the great multi-national
empires after the First World War
• rise of nationalism
• dissolution of solidarity between the
formerly oppressed nations
New divisions
• division of state into four national elements:
– state peoples
– unequal partners
– minorities (only nationals could be full citizens)
– stateless peoples (displaced persons)
Sources of decline
• imperialism,
• nationalism (anti-imperialist movements)
• intervention of western and communist
powers
• The role of minorities
End of the Rights of Man
• subordination of rights of individual to rights of national
self-determination
• “Everyone became convinced that true freedom, true
emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be
attained only with full national emancipation, that
people without their own national government were
deprived of human rights.” (Arendt)