- Person
- Hannah Arendt
- Lived
- 1906–1975
- Field
- Political Theory
- From
- German-American
The story
Hannah Arendt knew statelessness from the inside. Having fled Germany without papers in 1933, she lived as a refugee in Paris, where she worked to help Jewish young people emigrate. Germany stripped her of her citizenship in 1937, France interned her as an enemy alien in 1940, and she escaped to the United States in 1941. She did not become a citizen of any country again until 1951. In her 1943 essay "We Refugees" she wrote about how displaced people were treated less as human beings in need than as problems to be solved.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism she devoted a long chapter, The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, to what happens to people who lose the protection of any state. She argued that the supposedly inalienable Rights of Man proved unenforceable whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. Without a government willing to guarantee them, stateless people had no one to enforce their rights. The world, she wrote, found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.
She showed that neither repatriation nor naturalisation had solved the refugee crisis of her time. Countries would not take refugees back, receiving states treated them as illegal, and governments and citizens resisted naturalising them, so most were left in internment camps. From this she concluded that rights in practice depended on belonging to a political community, and that people who lost that membership lost the protection of rights altogether.
The chapter has been described as the most widely read essay on refugees ever published. The United Nations Refugee Agency is among the organisations that have recognised Arendt's contributions to human rights.
Her analysis remains strikingly relevant in an age of mass displacement. Scholars, lawyers and campaigners still turn to it when debating citizenship, asylum and the protection of stateless people, and her insight that rights depend on membership of a community continues to shape efforts to ensure that no one is left without a state to protect them.
Why it matters
Arendt's insight that rights depend on belonging to a political community continues to shape debates about refugees, citizenship and human rights.
About Hannah Arendt
Political theorist; "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "Eichmann in Jerusalem," and the phrase "the banality of evil."
More about Hannah Arendt
- Arendt was jailed by the Gestapo for exposing antisemitismIn 1933 Hannah Arendt secretly gathered evidence of Nazi antisemitism for the Zionist Federation of Germany. The Gestapo jailed her for eight days but could not read her coded notes.
- Hannah Arendt explained how ordinary people enable evilRefugee philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 and later coined "the banality of evil", ideas still used to understand how ordinary people take part in atrocity.
- Arendt's Human Condition found hope in every new birthIn The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt argued that natality, the capacity of each newborn person to begin something new, is the miracle that saves the world.
- Institutes in America and Germany carry Arendt's nameHannah Arendt's legacy lives on in Hannah Arendt Centers at Bard College and the New School, an institute for totalitarianism research in Dresden, and an annual prize for political thinking.
- Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism explained NazismHannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced the roots of Nazism and Stalinism through antisemitism and imperialism, and established her as a major thinker.
- Hannah Arendt helped Jewish children escape to PalestineIn Paris from 1935 to 1939, Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, and became its special agent for rescuing refugee children.
Sources
- Hannah Arendt Wikipedia
- The Origins of Totalitarianism Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.