Human rights and politics in The origins of totalitarianism

Abstract

In The origins of totalitarianism, Arendt celebrates the eighteenth century proclamation of human rights, claiming that it represented a turning point in history, because from then on Man, not God or the customs of history, should be the foundation of Law, that is, “Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal” (Arendt, 1976, p. 290). Nonetheless, soon after, Arendt criticizes this mythical and unidentifiable notion of Man as a metaphysical abstraction that cannot actually ground concrete rights. This works aims to analyze Arendt’s critique of the foundation of human rights, in order to understand the reason for these two different positions. We believe Arendt’s reflection shows that, more than theoretically denying human plurality (through the intrinsic imposition of an ideological perspective of man), the problem is that the way human rights were conceived in the eighteenth century prevents the possibility of implementing these rights in the twentieth century, revealing the need to rethink and redesign them in the light of the experiences of the context of the twentieth century. We intend to show that Arendt’s criticism to the abstraction of human rights denote her willingness of understanding and advocating the fundamental importance of the legal phenomenon as a whole to the exercise of Politics, and not her abdication of such rights.