Human Rights and Cosmopolitanism

Below the fold, extracts from Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings, Gary J. Bass' review of Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History, and Michael Blake's review of Seyla Benhabib (et al)'s Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations.

From  Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings (J. Kohn, ed):

In 1948, after the UN had sanctioned the state of Israel, Arendt predicted that ‘even if the Jews were to win the war [of independence], its end would find the . . . achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed . . . The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defence to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.’ She stated once again that partition could not work, and that the best solution would be a ‘federated state’. Such a federation, in her view, ‘would have the advantage of preventing the establishment of sovereignty whose only sovereign right would be to commit suicide.’ Arendt’s investment in the idea of federation was based on the hope that it would undercut nationalism and address the problem of statelessness. If the polity that would guarantee rights is not the nation-state, then it would be either a federation, in which sovereignty is undone through a distribution of its power, or a human rights framework that would be binding on those who collectively produced it. Rights do not belong to individuals, in Arendt’s view, but are produced in concert through their exercise. This post-metaphysical view was appropriate to the post-national federation she imagined for the Jews of Europe in the late 1930s, which is why a Jewish army could represent the ‘nation’ of Jews without any presumption of state or territory. It was also what she came to imagine in 1948 for Jews and for Palestinians, in spite of the founding of the state of Israel on nationalist premises and with claims of Jewish sovereignty. She can be faulted for naivety, but not for her prescience in predicting the recurrence of statelessness and the persistence of territorial violence. Arendt could be said to have embraced a diasporic politics, centred not on a Jewish homeland but on the rights of the stateless. To read her now is to be reminded of the passages in Edward Said’s book Freud and the Non-European where he suggests that Jews and Palestinians might find commonality in their shared history of exile and dispossession, and that diaspora could become the basis of a common polity in the Middle East. Said sees the basis of solidarity, in part, as the ‘irremediably diasporic, unhoused character of Jewish life’, which aligns it ‘in our age of vast population transfers’ with ‘refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants’. If Arendt sometimes argues for home and for belonging (though she does this less frequently over time), it is not to call for a polity built on those established ties of fealty. A polity requires the capacity to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging. This is the vanquishing of self-love – the movement away from narcissism and nationalism – which forms the basis for a just politics that would oppose both nationalism and those forms of state violence that reproduce statelessness and its sufferings. Arendt’s opposition to the dispossessions that afflict any and every minority represents a departure for Jewish thinking about justice. Her position does not universalise the Jew, but opposes the sufferings of statelessness regardless of national status. That the ‘nation’ continues to restrict her conception of the dispossessed minority is clear, and she leaves unanswered a set of important questions: is there an ‘outside’ to every federated polity? Must a federation assume ‘sovereignty’ in the context of international relations? Can international relations be organised on the basis of federative politics and, if so, can international federations enforce their laws without recourse to sovereignty? We have become accustomed over recent years to the argument that modern constitutions retain a sovereign function and that a tacit totalitarianism functions as a limiting principle within constitutional democracies. Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Carl Schmitt pays particular attention to the exercise of sovereign power to create a state of exception that suspends constitutional protections and rights of inclusion for designated populations within established democratic polities. Arendt’s Jewish Writings offer a valuable counter-perspective. Although Agamben is clearly indebted to Arendt’s The Human Condition in his elaboration of ‘bare life’ (the life which, jettisoned from the polis, is exposed to raw power), it is the nation-state rather than sovereignty that is Arendt’s focus in her work on totalitarianism. By insisting that statelessness is the recurrent political disaster of the 20th century (it now takes on new forms in the 21st), Arendt refuses to give a metaphysical cast to ‘bare life’. Indeed, she makes it quite clear in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the ostensible ‘state of nature’ to which displaced and stateless people are reduced is not natural or metaphysical at all, but the name for a specifically political form of destitution.

From Gary J. Bass' review of Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History:

Above all, rights themselves are supposed to be beyond debate. Nothing beats a right. After the middle of the eighteenth century, Americans and (somewhat more grudgingly) Britons increasingly talked about rights as universal, not particular to a given country. When the Americans and French solemnly declared, in 1776 and 1789, that their undeniable rights had been violated, they were trying to render uncontroversial a view of government that was in fact fiercely contested: that the point of government was to secure these rights of man. Hunt grasps the novelty, and the preciousness, of this intellectual transformation. Although she clearly believes in moral progress even unto her own day, she does not allow herself the smug luxury of assuming the superiority of the current age. She properly condemns Jefferson for owning slaves, but she insists that the really important point is that the flawed Jefferson and his flawed contemporaries nonetheless rose far above the mores of their day: "How did these men, living in societies built on slavery, subordination, and seemingly natural subservience, ever come to imagine men not at all like them and, in some cases, women too, as equals?" Hunt dwells on the shock of the violation of rights. One does not have a philosophical reaction to the photographs from Abu Ghraib, even if one's principles are offended; one first reacts viscerally. Hunt argues that "we are most certain that a human right is at issue when we feel horrified by its violation." As she notes, in the most famous articulation of the human rights ideal, Thomas Jefferson wrote only that the truth of rights is self-evident. But for rights really to be self-evident implies a widespread emotional recoil from their violation. Hunt is not troubled that Jefferson ducked the issue of rationally deriving rights from first principles. She thinks that the idea of human rights comes not from reason but from experience. What really counts, Hunt argues, is not so much the abstractions of equality and universality, but "the newfound power of empathy": the sense that the suffering of others is like our own. In our own time, this sense of empathy is nurtured by the mass media. For Hunt, that mostly means pictures in public exhibitions and wildly popular novels. When you hear about torture, you imagine yourself in the position of the person being tortured. (We sometimes do this even in circumstances when it might not make moral sense, such as feeling pity for Saddam Hussein while watching footage of him at the gallows.) Many people will not react with empathy to depictions of suffering; some people will get desensitized or will actually thrill to the cruelty. But if the spectacle of suffering does not make empathy inevitable, it certainly makes it possible. As Hunt writes, "New kinds of reading (and viewing and listening) created new individual experiences (empathy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights)." Hunt describes readers howling with emotion as they read Rousseau's epistolary novel Julie, or the New Héloïse. The historical significance of this literary hysteria, she argues, was that it showed readers identifying with characters very different from themselves. In an era of increasingly widespread literacy, novels were a kind of lesson in emotional and moral expansiveness. The point that literature has been a cause of empathy is not a new one, but it is still a good one. In Julie, or in Samuel Richardson's titanic Clarissa, the story unfolded through letters written by the characters, which allowed readers to discover the characters' innermost thoughts without any interference from a narrator. (Writers in our time now make epistolary fiction out of e-mails.) Men identified directly with Rousseau's and Richardson's emphatically female heroines -- although, a bit problematically for Hunt's argument, it took well over a century before anyone named Julie or Clarissa experienced anything like political emancipation. Class differences were imaginatively transcended as effectively as gender differences. And this closing of the distance between people represented, in Hunt's view, a huge leap of the moral imagination -- the sort of leap without which the idea of human rights would not have been possible. Torture is Hunt's most powerful example. With a White House that manifestly believes in torture as an instrument of national security policy, it is not just antiquarian to read that back in the eighteenth century people believed that torture could make the body speak truths even when the mind was unwilling. Judicially supervised torture was commonplace in France well into the eighteenth century, and much of Europe's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century criminal jurisprudence was dedicated to the codification of particular forms of torture. Prussia, of all places, led the way in abolishing judicial torture in 1754. From the 1760s, activists fought back against torture and the crueler forms of criminal punishment. French courts began to back away from torture as a way of extracting confessions. Their champion was a young Italian aristocrat named Cesare Beccaria, who was moved to write his Essay on Crimes and Punishments by an empathetic horror at the public spectacle of torture. To the traditionalists in the legal establishment, of course, that was the whole point: punishment had to be horrible for it to produce a deterrent effect among the watching mobs. Clearly not everyone had the same reaction to watching torture as Beccaria; otherwise nobody would have shown up. (The slasher movies of our time profit mightily from Beccaria's error.) Benjamin Rush denounced public punishment for its attempt to block the public from empathizing with the sufferer. For Rush, it was crucial to realize that even convicts "possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations." Hunt argues that people gradually came to believe that their bodies belonged to themselves and not to the community, and thus could not be sacrificed in the name of public order (or religion). As Beccaria's treatise was translated into English, German, Polish, and Spanish, torture and public execution withered. In 1780, the French essayist Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville wrote that the "sacred rights that man holds from nature, which society violates so often with its judicial apparatus, still require the suppression of a portion of our mutilating punishments and the softening of those which we must preserve." Brissot would go on to found France's first anti-slavery society. Hunt also quotes Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, suggesting that whereas torture might work for despotic governments, and ancient Greece and Rome certainly had slaves, "I hear the voice of nature crying out against me." By the 1780s, the absolute end of torture was a key tenet of human rights. The end of torture was one of the signature (and, if you consider the body count of the new republic, one of the most hypocritical) achievements of the French Revolution. Just six weeks after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, France's deputies completely abolished judicial torture. King Louis XVI had discontinued the use of torture to get guilty confessions, but had only provisionally abolished it for the purpose of finding out the names of accomplices -- what French law, with chilling euphemism, called the "preliminary question." Alberto Gonzales would have gone far at the court of Louis XVI.

And, from Michael Blake's review of Seyla Benhabib (et al)'s Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations:

Benhabib begins with a tension within the world of liberal democratic cosmopolitanism -- a tension she believes can be mediated, but never completely overcome. We are committed, on the one hand, to cosmopolitan norms of human rights, which seek to articulate a concept of legal rights that are universal and unconditional. We are also, however, committed to a bounded notion of democracy, in which democratic authority is derived from the self-imposed nature of legal norms. This tension, argues Benhabib, is of crucial importance for our political future; the tension between the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, requires more serious analysis the more unified and integrated our shared global network of institutions becomes. The process of mediation, suggests Benhabib, might be accomplished through the integration of universal cosmopolitan norms into democratic practice. In this, cosmopolitan norms become a part of the local, democratic practice. The very transparency and egalitarianism underlying democratic legitimation creates a place for the universalism of these global norms of mutual respect and hospitality. The process is described, following Derrida, through the logic of iteration; each repetition of the values of the universal becomes, in the particular instance, both a speaking of and a reply to the universal norms themselves. More prosaically, this process might be understood as a form of negotiation; the universal norms are challenged and given form by the specific challenges of the local political community, whose self-understanding in turn is adjusted through the application of universal concepts in its political discussions. Benhabib's analysis is centered around the figure of the resident alien -- subject to legal authority (thus, says Benhabib, a member of the demos) but not part of the community of identification grounding the local community (the ethnos). The process of iteration, suggests Benhabib, can explain and guide our relationship to these problematic residents. Her thought here is guided in part by Kant's comments regarding a "right to universal hospitality" (22-24). This notion of cosmopolitan right begins to point the way towards an understanding of the place within democracy of the alien. Benhabib adopts and expands this notion of hospitality, making it a site for the analysis of how cosmopolitanism might be used as a critical posture against the localism of domestic politics. Respect must be given, she suggests, both for the democratic life of the people, and the rights of the alien within that people's shared life. In this, she suggests that recent developments within the European Union can guide the way, as representative instances of the process of democratic iteration. Her discussion focuses here on the voting rights of non-residents, and the relationship between French Muslims and the traditionally secular French educational system. Both cases, she argues, represent an instance in which universal norms become adopted into the local legal community, giving voice to the traditionally alien, and making the demos more fairly representative of the universal norms guiding cosmopolitanism. Thus, her analysis of voting rights applauds the decisions recently made in Germany to disentangle voting rights from citizenship status. It similarly applauds the dialectical process of discussion between French Muslims and state officials regarding the place of headscarves within the secular school system. These examples both represent cases in which the rights associated with citizenship were challenged, negotiated, and altered in response to the universal ambitions of cosmopolitanism. The first case represents a clear example of this, in that political voice was there decoupled from political citizenship, creating a more universal and responsive community of voice. The second case also represents the process of mediation, in that the dialogue created a space for the voices of young Muslim women to speak back to the state about the significance of the Headscarf for Muslims. In these cases, she suggests, we find the beginning of a process by which citizenship as a concept is disaggregated and made more universal. This, says Benhabib, represents the beginning stages of a new form of cosmopolitanism -- in which the legal rights of citizenship are rendered more universal, thereby severing the illegitimate linkage between demos and ethnos.

(Cross posted to theoria.)