The Right to Have Rights

129 Pages·2018·1.55 MB·English

by  Stephanie Degooyer

The Right to
Have Rights
The Right to
Have Rights
Stephanie DeGooyer
Alastair Hunt
Lida Maxwell
Samuel Moyn
Afterword by Astra Taylor
First published by Verso 2018
© Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn 2018
Afterword © Astra Taylor 2018
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-754-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-752-3 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-753-0 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
Introduction: The Right to Have Rights 1
1. The Right … Stephanie DeGooyer 18
2. … to Have … Lida Maxwell 39
3. … Rights … Samuel Moyn 51
4. … of Whom? Alastair Hunt 64
Afterword(s) Astra Taylor 87
Acknowledgments 103
Notes 104
Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless,
once they had left their state they became stateless; once they
had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the
scum of the earth.
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Introduction
The Right to Have Rights
I
Between the ages of 27 and 45, Hannah Arendt was a stateless
refugee. In 1933, fearing for her life in Hitler’s Germany, she
sought safety in Paris. Two years later the Nuremberg Laws
formally confirmed what she had already intuited from her
experience: she and all other German Jews were no longer
citizens of the Reich. Effectively, she was homeless. After
the outbreak of the war in 1939, the French government
interned her and other “enemy nationals” at a camp at Gurs
in southern France. Amid the chaos caused by the German
occupation of France in 1940, Arendt escaped and made her
way deeper into the unoccupied part of the country. Seeking
a way out of Europe, she appealed to US diplomats. However,
the State Department discouraged the issuance of visas to
any of the thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis. Through a
combination of sheer luck, quick thinking, and assistance from
several individuals, including an American diplomat prepared
to defy his government’s directives, Arendt was able to secure
a Nansen passport, a French exit visa, Spanish and Portuguese
transit visas, and a US emergency visa. These documents
allowed her to travel, in 1941, to the United States, where she
was granted asylum as a refugee. In 1951, she was naturalized
as a US citizen.1
That same year, Arendt published her first English-
language book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In one of the
book’s central chapters, she reflected on what her experience
as a stateless refugee had taught her about the ways in which
individuals come to lose and gain rights. 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. Only as a citizen of a nation-state can a person
enjoy legally protected rights to education, to work, to vote, to
healthcare, to culture, and so on. 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.”
Arendt was writing about her own time and experience. The
argument of the present book, however, is that her phrase—
“the right to have rights”—offers a key resource for thinking
and acting politically in our own moment, especially in an age
where an ever-increasing number of people across the globe
are unable to secure meaningful membership in any political
community. The most conspicuous group in this predicament
are, of course, the migrants and refugees who have been forced
by violent conflict or climate change to flee their homelands
and seek asylum in other countries. The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees reports that, as of 2015, there are
65.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, 21.3 million
of them refugees.2 Those without functioning citizenship,
however, also include the millions of undocumented immigrants,
or sans papiers, who reside in countries without holding the
legal permission to do so. A smaller but no less significant group
includes those currently held in indefinite detention without
The Right to Have Rights 2
3 The Right to Have Rights
trial by supposedly civilized governments. Yet another group
comprises ordinary workers of many western nations who,
although legally citizens of the country in which they live, find
their ability to access the full range of citizens’ rights threatened
by the assault of neoliberal market fundamentalism on public
institutions. Compounding the problems faced by all of these
groups is the rise of neoliberal populist movements worldwide,
which have made a trade out of xenophobic and nativist
rhetoric and used this rhetoric, successfully, to gain political
power—with, ironically, support from the disenfranchised
citizens whose precarious predicament they have created.
A number of activists and scholars have already called upon
Arendt’s “right to have rights” to make sense of and intervene
into our current struggles in democratic politics. Most of them,
however, tend to treat the phrase as merely another, more poetic
name for “human rights.” This is perhaps understandable
among activists who are eager to find assistance for their
causes. However, even scholars who give Arendt’s phrase, and
the argument that threw it up, more thorough consideration
tend to reduce the “right to have rights” to a new-and-
improved version of human rights. Arendt would have been
critical of such a move. In her work, the phrase is born out of
a critique of human rights. This critique is not only directed at
the inadequacy of the institutional mechanisms meant to ensure
the practical implementation of these rights, but also at the
insufficiency of human rights as a theoretical concept coherent
enough to become the basis of democratic politics.
This book aims to develop resources for democratic struggle
by offering critical readings of the “right to have rights” that
are attentive to subtleties, complexities, ambiguities, and
potentialities too quickly glossed over in existing interpretations
of the phrase. Without dismissing the importance of campaigns
for human rights, the contributors to this volume aim to
challenge the reflexive assimilation of Arendt’s phrase into the
paradigm of human rights. We do so by turning to the texts in
which Arendt first developed the phrase and to those places in
her larger body of work where we hear the phrase resonating.
In all cases, we try to understand, as precisely as we can, the
argument she makes and the rhetorical features of her texts,
even when they might seem marginal or minor, as symptoms of
her own intellectual struggle.
Moreover, unlike much of the scholarship that does exist on
the “right to have rights,” we find it important to look beyond
the first “right” in the phrase. Taken together the four chapters
give equal consideration to all of the construction’s parts: its
two nouns (“right” and “rights”), its infinitive verb (“to have”),
and even its hidden subject. Thus, in the first chapter, Stephanie
DeGooyer thinks critically about whether this single “right” to
have rights really is any kind of foundation at all; in Chapter
2, Lida Maxwell examines the implications of the infinitive
“to have”; the third chapter, by Samuel Moyn, considers the
oft-neglected pluralized “rights” in the phrase; and in Chapter
4, Alastair Hunt asks after the implied, but unnamed, bearers
of the “right to have rights.” The afterword by Astra Taylor
looks outside the phrase altogether, to its relevance to the
conditions of what she calls “transnational oligarchy,” or
the deterritorialized flows of capital that threaten to make all
people, even citizens, dispossessed and rightless.
The Right to Have Rights 4