5 Week 05

I’ve been thinking about our discussion last Wednesday and want to mention a couple of points from Ranciere’s essay, “Who is the Subject of Human Rights,” as they relate to arguments from Moyn’s book The Last Utopia.

In the introduction of his essay, Ranciere reads Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism to stress a distinction she makes. Arendt differentiates “the rights of man,” or political life, from “bare life,” or a conceptualization of “humanness” that she defines as a life that is abstracted from the political realm. As Ranciere explains, Arendt situates this turn—from the rights of man to human rights—as emerging from the conditions in Europe after World War I. In the aftermath of the war, there were refugees who had no link to “nation” that would ensure their rights. Like Arendt, Moyn suggests we need to differentiate the rights of man that predicated politics on a relationship to the state from the notion of “human rights” that emerges in the 1940s and that people begin to rally around in the 1970s and 1980s. As Moyn writes, “[human rights] was less the annunciation of a new age than a funeral wreath laid on the grave of wartime hopes” (2010:2).

But in his reading of Arendt, Ranciere stresses (and disagrees with) this distinction between political and social freedom. For Arendt, political freedom refers to the right of the people to oppose political domination, but her conception of social freedom refers to a conditionality of immediate necessity where there are forms of life that are not even worth oppressing. Connected to social freedom are the private rights of those who have nothing left other than their property of being human (Ranciere, 2004:298). Ranciere seems to object to Arendt’s argument that a political world is emerging that treats certain persons as beyond the realm of rights and counters Arendt’s approach with an understanding of “human rights” that instead politicizes distinctions that determine who can participate in politics.

Due Sunday, February 26th, by midnight. Word count: 400 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. If you paraphrase, make sure to include the proper citation.

In chapter one of Samuel Moyn’s work, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he begins to make his argument that “the rights of man,” though a powerful influence on the organization of politics during the nineteenth century, is different from the concept of “human rights” as described in the 1940s and as the concept continues to be used today. In your own words, explain how you think Moyn differentiates these terms: “the rights of man” and “human rights.”