The right to have rights
- Autores: Deyana Marcheva
- Localización: Rights of citizens and their protection: Collection of reports and papers presented at the international scientific conference in honour of acad. Antonio Fernández de Buján y Fernández, Doctor Honoris Causa of New Bulgarian University, held on 6 November 2018, 2019, ISBN 978-619-233-079-8, págs. 457-472
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The famous phrase of Hannah Arendt “the right to have rights” sums up the scepticism about the theory and practice of human rights. Hannah Arendt was a stateless refugee for eighteen years, from the time she fled Nazi Germany, in 1933, until she was naturalized as a United States citizen, in 1951. She personally experienced that her human rights were not guaranteed by humanity itself, but she had to be a member of a political community to enjoy her rights. For the ancient Greeks it was inconceivable that anyone outside of the polis could be a human. Later on, Christianity declared itself apolitical and the human was henceforth seen not only as a political being, but, moreover, and above all, as a social being. The structural Christianity of the modern democratic state is the basis of Karl Marx’s criticism directed against democracy and the concept of Man in his analysis of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 in his brief text “On the Jewish Question” (1844). Marx’s diagnosis that human rights were conceived only in national laws proved disastrously correct a century later during the Second World War and was sharpened by Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951). Hannah Arendt illustrated the many perplexities inherent in the concept of human rights and substantiated her idea of “the right to have rights”.
