The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer & Alastair Hunt & Lida Maxwell & Samuel Moyn

Author:Stephanie DeGooyer & Alastair Hunt & Lida Maxwell & Samuel Moyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Human Rights as Biopolitical Fantasy

Everyone agrees that the phrase “the right to have rights” emerges in the course of a critical account of what Arendt calls “the perplexities of the rights of man.” But just how critical this account is remains inadequately understood. The main target of her critique is the bold assumption that the status of the subject of rights is a direct expression of human nature. This assumption is already on display in the widely repeated definition of human rights as the rights that human beings possess simply by virtue of being human.6 But it is unmistakable, Arendt suggests, in the naturalistic language of the great declarations of human rights.7 “All men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” reads article 1 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued at the start of the French Revolution in 1789.8 To say that birth as a human being is the only requisite for possessing human rights, she points out, is to say that such rights “spring immediately from,” “could be deduced [from],” or are “given with human nature as such.”9 Put otherwise, to present human rights as birthrights is to assume that the status of the subject of rights, far from being the product of action, including that form of action known as speech, is built in to all specimens of the species Homo sapiens—that, as DeGooyer and Maxwell pointed out in previous chapters, the rights are natural. It is precisely this logic that makes it possible for any literal assertion of membership in the human species—such as the assertion “I AM A MAN” written on signs held by black US civil rights protesters in 1968—to be read metaphorically as a claim to the status of a subject of rights.

Arendt is unsentimental in her criticism of this high assessment of the intrinsic political value of human nature. It is, she says, a fantasy. For even if we assume that such a thing as “human nature” does exist and can be known—and she observes grave doubts about both assumptions10—this nature is hardly capable, by itself, of transforming human beings into subjects of rights. Being a member of the human species, she insists, like all features of “mere existence,” contains no intrinsic political significance that could be either understood or misunderstood.11 The status of subject of rights does not “grow out” of human nature; rather, it is a “product” of institutions that are by definition “convention and artificial,”12 “the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice.”13 In a flat denial of the basic logic of human rights, Arendt declares, “We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.”14 In short, human rights are predicated on a desire to escape the fact that human nature does not by itself decide for us who can be bearers of rights.

However, Arendt does more than criticize as fantastical the notion that being human possesses an intrinsic political value.

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