Nothing but Human, Essay Example

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) is a fundamental document containing the principles that inspired the French Revolution, adopted by France’s National assembly and served as a preamble to the Constitution of 1791, (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Hannah Arendt’s works centers around the concept of powers. In her last work, The Life of the Mind, as with all her other literary works, she points out that the concept of power fuels her to propose that life is a relation of the solitude thinking and an inborn power of thinking. To her the paradigms of all power remain political power. This power is against political domination. She puts it that power cannot be mastered, instrumentalized or organized via administration, law, or governmental power. Power emerges spontaneously challenging those ruling either through democracy or tyranny.

Her problem with the Declaration of the Human Rights of Man and Citizen (1879) are that human right cannot be separated from the sovereign will of the nation state and this schema does not allow for the right of those who are unrecognized as being part of the general will, Arendt, 1968).

She also argues that at the individual level, one has to be a national figure for his rights to be recognized. Those that saw this are the group that lost the protection of the sovereign state: “The rights of man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be not enforceable – even in countries whose constitutions are based on them – whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state”, (Arendt, 1968). She echoes that we as human beings are singular and concrete by the exercise of human rights tied up to state sovereignty and those that were deprived of them became human beings without portfolio. The abstract person is he who is deprived of the human rights. This abstraction is the abstract nudity of those who are nothing other than human beings who are naked as the day they were born. She argues that to escape this “abstract nudity”, those who were stateless “insisted upon their nationality, this ultimate fact of their being citizens”, (Arendt, 1968).

Arendt continues to argue that the state cannot give human rights. Human rights are inherent in the human nature and as such the state cannot claim to give such rights to human beings. This could reduce the human rights to a political dispensation.

These problems identified by Arendt are founded in J.-J. Rousseau’s document. He puts that though as human beings we are born free we have to identify with a society or state for him to feel the fulfilment he clings for in life. Hence the essence of being citizens of a given state. Being social animals, human being requires being in the company of other for them to feel as free animal. This comes from the interaction with other and the limitations that come with them as they have to control themselves when in the company of others.

In his work, Agamben dwells on the problem of the stateless people and brings his attention to challenges of such people. The state of being stateless leads to the disappearance of politics since the political affiliations are weakened. This again leads to the rise of police states since the absence of politics means that there has to be some other authority to lead people.

To Arendt, the rights of the refugees who are rendered stateless remain as inherent as ever since no state can grant ant human rights and freedom. They still should enjoy their freedom even though stateless. This again implies that the rights of refugees as human beings should be respected by others. These refugees, even though stateless exist among a people with a state and as such should be treated as such and the rights and freedom inherent in them as human being be treated as such.

Work cited

Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968)

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005)

Encyclopedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com