Human rights are at an ambiguous juncture. On the one hand, they have never known such success. Over the last two decades they have become the coin of the normative realm, the lingua franca of moral and political claim making. The institutions, legal instruments, and community devoted to their propagation are expanding at an unprecedented rate. As Michael Ignatieff put it (Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 3–4), “human rights is the language that systematically embodies [the] intuition” that “our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it is entitled to equal moral consideration.” Human rights are, according to Kofi Annan, “the yardstick by which we measure human progress” (quoted in Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 53). On the other hand, some worry that human rights are in danger of falling victim to this very success. Even friendly critics of the human rights movement find its record over the last fifteen years decidedly mixed. Ignatieff worries that “we are intervening in the name of human rights as never before, but our interventions are sometimes making matters worse” (ibid., 47), while David Kennedy (Reference Kennedy2004, chap. 1) expresses concern that human rights have become “part of the problem.” For skeptics, the more recent use of human rights rhetoric to justify what some regard as imperial aggression—a practice with deep historical roots—finally exposed its emptiness. From this perspective, far from being “weapons for the critique of power,” human rights “have now become part of the arsenal of power” (Guilhot Reference Guilhot2005, 8).

We might respond that such problems are transitional, symptoms of the practical difficulties of implementing human rights. The international human rights regime is still in its infancy and has much to learn; its institutions are relatively new and still far from robust. As experience and resources accumulate, as institutions mature, we can look forward to more successful efforts on behalf of human rights. As for the hijacking of human rights for projects that might seem to contradict their spirit, we can respond that the hypocritical appropriation of a principle need not undermine the principle; as la Rochefoucauld observed, it pays the principle tribute. This, at any rate, seems to be the dominant thinking today in human rights circles. My question here is whether this diagnosis goes deep enough. I suggest that part of the reason for the difficulties of human rights lies in how we understand the relation between human rights and politics. Human rights are meant to protect and promote the freedom and dignity of every human being; they aim at “empowering the powerless” and “giving voice to the voiceless” (Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 70). Yet they can give rise to a politics that at least sometimes accomplishes the opposite—it can empower the powerful, render their use of power arbitrary and unaccountable, and “create dependency rather than . . . empower” their intended beneficiaries (Chandler Reference Chandler2005, 171).

In the following I explore three different ways of understanding the politics of human rights. My guide is Hannah Arendt, whose familiar yet enigmatic formula, “the right to have rights,” neatly encapsulates the political challenge of human rights, yet has been interpreted in a variety ways that reflect very different conceptions of politics. Conventional, liberal interpretations, which I discuss with reference to Michael Ignatieff and Michael Walzer, illustrate the problems that arise when universalistic moral aspirations are combined with a statist conception of politics: incapable of thinking ends and means together, the politics that results can end up undermining the very purpose of human rights. The second conception, which I trace back to Kant and discuss in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, improves on the first, but ends up faltering at a different point: seeking to bridge morality and law, it cannot concretely conceive of how to realize the aims it envisions. A third, democratic conception, based in Arendt's writings as productively extended by Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, insists that the politics of human rights must be rooted in the practices of rights-bearers themselves. While this account is at once the least familiar and the most demanding, I argue that it is the only one that fully honors human rights’ emphasis on autonomy.

I refer to these understandings as images, rather than ideas or concepts, because they grow out of largely implicit assumptions about the nature of politics and political theory. Without directly posing the question, those who take the first, liberal view tend to assume that their task is to identify justifiable uses of state power; those who take the second assume it is to outline how such power should be organized; and those who take the third assume it is to discover moments of autonomous political action. As will become clear below, these assumptions can have important practical implications, rendering certain problems and courses of action self-evident and others invisible. In addition, while I isolate these three images for heuristic purposes, they tend to shade into one another, and may in certain instances appear as different aspects of or perspectives on the same situation. Disentangling these views can help us see their potentially divergent ramifications. In the end I suggest that while each of these images of human rights politics may be appropriate to different circumstances and speak to different concerns, the third, democratic image can help us understand some of the problems that plague efforts on behalf of human rights while also serving as a better guide to practice, showing how human rights can best be realized and secured.

PRELUDE: HUMAN RIGHTS, POLITICAL NOT METAPHYSICAL

It is now common to distinguish between philosophical and political approaches to human rights. Philosophical approaches ask what these rights are, why we have them, what they are based on, how they can best be justified, which are most fundamental, and so on. Political approaches, in contrast, start with the problem of putting human rights into practice. Taking their cue from the lawyer's saying,“no rights without remedies,” they seek to connect human rights with institutions and practices that can guarantee them. From this perspective, the universal validity of human rights is of little moment if they are not effective. Conversely, when human rights are respected, the question of their foundations is much less urgent—whence the widespread view that it is sufficient to establish an “overlapping consensus on human rights,” in the formula Charles Taylor borrows from John Rawls (Taylor Reference Taylor, Bauer and Bell1999).Footnote ¹ Ignatieff (Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 54) agrees, arguing that we should “forgo . . . foundational arguments altogether and seek to build support for human rights on the basis of what such rights actually do for human beings.” On this view, as Norberto Bobbio (Reference Bobbio and Cameron1996, 12) puts it:

My impression is that this political view now has the upper hand, and that human rights’ defenders are now less troubled by rights’ extra-political provenance or justification and focus more on the practical task of realizing them. The development of human rights regimes and instruments has fostered a spirit of pragmatism. For practitioners, it is enough to assume the validity of the rights adumbrated in various agreements and focus on implementing them. In a leading text in the area, for instance, Jack Donnelly concedes that “[t]here is no strong foundation for human rights”—“or, what amounts to the same thing, there are multiple, or inconsistent, ‘foundations.’” This does not make them “arbitrary” or “merely conventional,” he continues, since, “[l]ike all social practices, human rights come with, and in an important sense require, justifications. But those justifications appeal to ‘foundations’ that are ultimately a matter of agreement or assumption rather than proof” (Donnelly Reference Donnelly2003, 20, 21). To be sure, there is a thin philosophical core to even pragmatic approaches to human rights, which centers on protecting the dignity and autonomy of each and every human being. What distinguishes a political from a philosophical approach is that a political approach is content to leave this core largely unspecified. Thus, when Alasdair MacIntyre (Reference Macintyre1981, 67) objects that “[t]here are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches or unicorns,” we might answer with a Rortyan shrug.Footnote ² Rather than unicorns, we might respond, think of them as mules. They do not exist in nature and do not reproduce on their own, but they can exist. If the philosopher claims that rights are nonsense, even nonsense on stilts, the pragmatist need not be troubled. From a pragmatic and in that sense political point of view, the essential difference between a unicorn and a mule is not that the mule exists, but that it will work.

We owe probably the most celebrated statement of what I am calling a political perspective on human rights to Hannah Arendt. Her starting point was a case in which human rights emphatically did not work, that of stateless persons before, during, and after the Second World War. In her reflections on “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Arendt juxtaposes a philosophical to a political perspective and finds the former distinctly wanting. For her, the problem was that the rights philosophers attributed to nature or reason had no political counterparts. In practice, human rights ended up being rights people had after all their other rights had been taken away—in the end, no rights at all. “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony,” she lamented, “than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights which are enjoyed only by the citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves” (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 279). The very idea of human rights became equated with “hopeless idealism” or “feeble-minded hypocrisy” (1973, 269). This discrepancy arose, on her view, in part because philosophers, advocates, and practitioners alike forgot the most basic right of all: “the right to have rights.”

On first glance, her suggestion is puzzling. If the problem with human rights is that in and of themselves they guarantee nothing, it is hard to see how it can be solved by adding one more right to guarantee the rest. On Seyla Benhabib's (Reference Benhabib2004, 55–58, following Michelman Reference Michelman1996) reading, the pregnancy of Arendt's formula comes from using the word “right” in two distinct senses. It first appears as a moral right, something every human being should have, then reappears three words later in the plural, as positive rights. The former, moral right, is addressed to everyone—which is to say, to no one in particular. This is why it so often has no practical effect. The latter, positive rights, in contrast, are guaranteed such that their violation is prevented, or, if they are violated, their bearer has effective recourse. On a political view, only positive rights are “real” rights. Moral rights, in contrast, are merely ideal, some relation of MacIntyre's unicorns. Arendt's formulation does not, to be sure, solve the problem, but it does reframe it, for its effect is to turn the idea of human rights into a practical-political challenge: moral rights must become positive rights. The question, of course, is how.

HUMAN RIGHTS POLITICS AS IMPLEMENTATION

I begin with the most common interpretation of Arendt's phrase. Observing that “the Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable . . . whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state,” Arendt (Reference Arendt1973, 293, 297) associated “a right to have rights” with “a right to belong to some kind of organized community.” From this it is usually concluded that her “right to have rights” is a right to civic rights, i.e., to citizenship. Like Edmund Burke, whose attack on the vacuity of the French Revolution's “rights of man” she praises for its “pragmatic soundness,” her point would be that human rights are an empty abstraction. Only national rights—Burke's “rights of Englishmen”—are real (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 299). On this basis, commentators conclude that Arendt was a human rights skeptic who saw hope for effective rights protection only in a revitalization of national politics (e.g., Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004, Canovan Reference Benhabib1992). As Michael Walzer (Reference Walzer2005, 7) puts it, the right to have rights is “the right to have an effective state,” namely, “a state that enforces rights,” noting that “some states protect some rights some of the time and no other political agency does that much.”Footnote ³As Walzer's qualifications point out, however, this state must be willing and able to protect rights. In the cases that concerned Arendt, states failed, depriving people of the rights they previously had. The problem to which “human,” as opposed to “civic,” rights respond is precisely that states can trample on rights, be indifferent to their violation, or be too weak to defend them.

On the first image of the politics of human rights I want to examine here, this politics therefore consists in finding an agency to implement and enforce rights, a surrogate for an absent, enfeebled, negligent, or malevolent state. We can best elucidate the logic of this understanding by taking an easy case from a moral point of view: massive human rights violations, which expose the problem of human rights at its starkest, where moral urgency is at its zenith and political capacity at its nadir. If anything is uncontroversially a basic human right, it is the right not to be massacred; if anything can justify the suspension of state sovereignty and international law, it is mass slaughter. The discrepancy between the clarity of this moral imperative and the inertia of the international system in such cases has been a major inspiration for challenges to state sovereignty.Footnote ⁴ Even Walzer, who is ordinarily as skeptical of cosmopolitan idealism as he is protective of the right to national self-determination (Walzer Reference Walzer and Beitz1985), endorses a “right to intervene” in the face of crimes that, in the time-honored phrase, “shock the conscience of mankind”:

The type of intervention Walzer calls for has nonetheless proven difficult and controversial. Two kinds of problems typically arise. The first is practical: the problem of means. Massive human rights violations cannot be prevented, halted, or punished by unicorns or even by mules. What is needed is a cavalry, overwhelming force, which only very powerful states can ordinarily bring to bear. In the absence of a world state or an independent international military force, the logical implication of this is, as David Chandler (Reference Chandler2005, 181) observes, that “[t]he exercise of this right of protection or prevention is dependent on the actions of international institutions and major powers [that] have the economic and the military resources to intervene.” According to Chandler, this leads to a paradox: the initiatives most expressive of a desire to transcend the power-based logic of the state system remain wholly dependent on it. By relying on the power of the dominant states, humanitarian interventions reinforce their position. As Chandler (Reference Chandler2002, 111) notes, “the imperative of action to defend human rights ironically entails a realpolitik which is highly state-centric and, in fact, not only reflects but also reinforces the highly uneven balance of existing power relations.” Above all in the most urgent cases, the politics of humanitarianism ends up being a politics of the stronger.

The difficulties inherent in the “right to protect” only attain their full dimensions, however, when this power-political logic meets another. As is clear from Walzer's remarks, the impetus behind humanitarian intervention is moral and unconditional: something terrible is happening and someone—anyone—should stop it (e.g., Power Reference Power2002). As has been pointed out at least since Machiavelli, however, certain features of moral imperatives combine awkwardly with politics. In the moral realm it is not unusual to privilege intentions over consequences; the only unqualified good, as Kant famously put it, is a good will. In politics, where action is subject to the law of unintended consequences, such a view can lead to recklessness. Likewise, morality encourages and at times even requires us to see the world in terms of good and evil; clarity of vision can be a moral virtue. In politics things are seldom so simple, and imagining that they are can lead to serious mischief. Where these political and moral logics combine—the political fact that implementing moral imperatives depends on superior might and a moral logic that puts a premium on good intentions and clear distinctions—the result can be overwhelming force combined with total conviction and a dangerous oversimplification of complex situations. And so human rights advocates sometimes find themselves in the paradoxical position of bombing and invading people in the name of human rights, bringing about situations that may be worse than the predicaments they hoped to resolve, and then wondering at their beneficiaries’ lack of gratitude.Footnote ⁶

It is partly in response to problems of this kind that commentators have tried to rethink human rights on a more political basis. Challenging the assumption that “human rights is above politics, a set of moral trump cards,” Ignatieff (Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 21–22) insists that “[h]uman rights is nothing other than a politics, one that must reconcile moral ends to concrete situations and must be prepared to make painful compromises not only between means and ends, but between ends themselves.” Jeffrey Isaac (Reference Isaac2002b, 532) echoes this sentiment: “Human rights require politics, and politics requires difficult, imperfect, and tragic choices without end.” While both insist that human rights are political, however, neither explains exactly what this means. Isaac (Reference Isaac2002b, 514) writes that human rights sometimes require “political means,” while Ignatieff (Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 9) suggests that it is a matter of “taking sides, mobilizing constituencies powerful enough to force abusers to stop.” Although they do not name him, both authors unmistakably evoke Max Weber. The image of politics as a realm of compromises and tragic choices between ultimate ends is the hallmark of Weber's 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” where he famously distinguished between an “ethic of conviction” or “ethic of ultimate ends” and an “ethic of responsibility” (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946, 120). Commitment to a cause, Weber insisted, must always be tempered by willingness to answer for the consequences of one's actions.Footnote ⁷

Weber's warning remains invaluable for those contemplating the use of force. At the same time, I suggest that we can see a deeper reason for the paradoxical turns of the politics of human rights by turning to his understanding of politics. For Weber, politics is defined by the fact that it “operates with very special means, namely, power [Macht] backed up by violence [Gewaltsamkeit]” (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946, 119). Politics may serve various ends, including moral ones, but it is defined by the use of power, which Weber (Reference Weber, Parsons and Parsons1997, 152) understands as “the probability that one actor in a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance. . . .” Politics, on this conception, is domination or rule (Herrschaft), with power and always potentially violence as its instruments. The deeper paradox that underlies the conventional view of the politics of human rights is thus a built-in discrepancy between the ends of human rights (equal freedom and dignity) and the means used to implement or secure them (the power of the stronger): human rights seek to protect some from arbitrary or unjust power, but can do so only by summoning another, greater power.Footnote ⁸ This paradox can be expressed as a discrepancy between the agent of this politics and its beneficiary. Human rights “belong” to one party, but power is used on their behalf by another. The politics of human rights is, seemingly of necessity, something the powerful do for the powerless.

This feature of human rights politics tends to be downplayed even—perhaps especially—when it is assumed. Ignatieff (Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 18), for example, argues that “the very purpose of rights language is to protect and enhance individual agency.” Yet the active “we” of his account seldom refers to those whose rights are at issue; “we” are the citizens or decision makers of powerful states, human rights professionals and the agencies they work for. Indeed, as Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2004) points out, Ignatieff's conception of human rights works in important ways to disempower those to whom these rights ostensibly belong. For instance, while Ignatieff numbers basic civil and political rights (including property rights) among human rights, he—like the U. S. government—insists that they stop there. Identifying human rights with Isaiah Berlin's “negative liberty,” he excludes social and economic rights. On the one hand, he explains, this restriction is meant to stave off “rights inflation,” which would dilute human rights and make it more difficult to win consensus for them; on the other, it is meant to insulate human rights against “collective rights,” which pose the threat of tyranny of the majority (Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 90–91).

As Brown shows, however, Ignatieff's commitment to individual agency has broader political ramifications. He may, like Walzer, believe that if we “take care of the short list [basic civil and political rights], . . . it is far more likely . . . that the longer list [social rights] will be taken care of by the people most directly concerned” (Walzer Reference Walzer2005, 10; cf. Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 90). But he depicts human rights politics in a way that seems to rule out any fundamental change in the terms of political relations. Only individuals and individual choices are to be protected; social and collective rights are rejected on the basis that they could foster a powerful state that could suppress individual rights (Brown Reference Brown2004, 547f). The sort of self-organization and empowerment Walzer invokes thus appears to be precisely what Ignatieff's curtailed catalogue of rights seeks to avoid. “Rights are inescapably political,” Ignatieff (Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 67) proclaims, “because they tacitly imply a conflict between a rights holder and a rights ‘withholder,’ some authority against which the right holder can make justified claims.” The point of human rights is to ensure “that power be exercised over [rights holders] in ways that respect their autonomy as agents” (Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff and Gutmann2001, 68). Human rights, on this view, do not aim to fundamentally alter this relationship, only to civilize it, to keep it within certain bounds. They represent moral limits to the exercise of power, which in turn can only be enforced by another, still greater power.

The paradoxes of this first, Weberian image of rights seem to inhere in the situations in which human rights are most urgently required: some are oppressed and another, greater power than the one oppressing them must intervene on their behalf. To be sure, one can hardly object to the desire to make the exercise of power more humane, and in the conclusion of this article I suggest how an alternative view of human rights politics can help minimize its contradictions. For now I only want to underline the paradox at its heart: rights and their beneficiaries depend on a superior, external power. This contradicts the idea that rights express the principles of autonomy and equality. While rights secured by external intervention may be helpful, welcome, even morally imperative, on this conception they do not correspond to a right, which I can exercise when and how I like, but to a gift. The impulse behind this politics is essentially philanthropic. But if human rights are to serve the equal freedom of every human being, we cannot be satisfied with merely taming the use of power; we must seek to correct its imbalances. This is something the politics of human rights on this first conception cannot do. With Brown and against Ignatieff, then, I want to argue that this picture of the politics of human rights is not “the best we can hope for” (Brown Reference Brown2004, quoting Ignatieff). To see how we might aspire to more, I therefore turn to a second conception of the politics of human rights.

HUMAN RIGHTS POLITICS AS RIGHT

One response to the practical and conceptual problems exposed so far is to insist that human rights politics rest not on the good will of outsiders, but should belong to and be based on the rights holders themselves. On the next conception I explore, this leads to a fundamentally different understanding of politics. Instead of seeing politics as the use of power to achieve certain ends, this view seeks to tame power by reshaping the framework within which actions occur. Instead of seeing an immediate relation between moral imperatives and political actions, on this view morality finds expression in institutions. At the core of this view is the Kantian notion of “right” (Recht). Unlike the first view, this one is holistic. Rather than particular outcomes, it seeks justice, which it understands as a property of laws and institutions. Especially in the wake of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which revived the idea that the problem of justice is essentially that of a “well-ordered society,” this broadly Kantian approach has dominated normative political theory. As I will explain, however, it has a serious deficiency for thinking about the politics of human rights: instead of solving the problem of the relation between morality and power, it displaces it, transforming it into the problem of achieving just institutions.

We should first note that, while Kant is frequently invoked in the literature on human rights, he was not, strictly speaking, a human rights theorist. The famous passage in “Perpetual Peace” in which Kant (Reference Kant and Reiss1991, 107–8) optimistically claims that humanity has reached a point “where a violation of rights [Rechtsverletzung] in one part of the world is felt everywhere” does not involve “human rights violations” in today's sense. Kant was referring to right and/or rights within states.Footnote ⁹ In fact, Kant recognized only one universal, cosmopolitan, and in that sense human right: the right to visit [Besuchsrecht], though not to settle in, other countries, which he felt would promote “commerce”—not only trade but, in the broad, eighteenth-century sense of the term, ‘interaction’ and thus cosmopolitan understanding and solidarity (Kant Reference Kant and Reiss1991, 114; Muthu Reference Muthu2000). Otherwise, Kant believed that rights should be secured by and within states. To this extent, he did not propose a solution to the problem posed by Arendt. For her part, Arendt (Reference Arendt1973, 298) saw Kant's approach as insufficient: “The right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself,” she asserted, though she despaired of this coming to pass: “It is by no means certain whether this is possible.”

Some contemporary neo-Kantians argue that international law and institutions have already gone well beyond Kant's vision, and a good distance toward quelling Arendt's concerns. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, argues that Kant found himself suspended between the alternatives of a world republic and a confederation of republics that ultimately rested on a balance of power because, “although [he] had good reasons for his idea of a transformation of state-centered international law toward cosmopolitan law, he did not develop it in sufficiently abstract terms” (Habermas Reference Habermas and Cronin2006, 126–7). Once we recognize that “the state in its modern form is not a necessary precondition of a constitutional order,” we can envision existing international institutions growing into a sort of non-state constitutional order like the EU or the UN (Habermas Reference Habermas and Cronin2006, 137). Seyla Benhabib's diagnosis is similar. On her reading, both Kant and Arendt missed the possibilities of supranational rights protection because both assumed the sovereign nation-state as the basis of politics.Footnote ¹⁰ For both Kant and Arendt, Benhabib (Reference Benhabib2004, 66–7) agues:

Benhabib and Habermas agree, then, that the best chance for human rights protection lies in the spread of regional and international legal regimes, which would limit state sovereignty by means of reciprocally enforced cosmopolitan law.

Yet although Habermas and Benhabib see prospects for institutionalizing human rights beyond those envisioned by Kant, they remain very close to the Kantian model for theorizing rights in two important respects. First, their models are directed more toward justification than genesis or implementation. Consider the main innovation of Habermas's theory of rights and democracy, his so-called “co-originality” (Gleichursprunglichkeit) thesis. Habermas argues that there is no necessary tension between “liberal” individual rights (to privacy, due process, etc.) and “republican” political rights (to assembly, participation, etc.) because each can be understood as the precondition and guarantee of the other:

This argument neatly reconciles private and public autonomy, the rule of law and democracy, human rights and popular sovereignty, even if it understates the tensions that may arise between them in practice. By starting “with the horizontal relationships that citizens have with one another,” it “allows us to avoid the liberal fixation on the question of how one controls the state's monopoly on violence” (Habermas Reference Habermas and Pensky2001, 122). But it achieves this only on the level of justification. Let us grant that this is how constitutional democracy should work. How do these relationships come into being in the first place? How do they achieve political effects? And how could they do so on a global level, what Arendt called the level of “humanity,” where the need for human rights in fact arises? In the absence of the democratic constitution that Habermas seeks to elucidate, it is unclear how the virtuous circle he describes between public and private autonomy could get started.

Similarly, when Benhabib unlocks the riddle of Arendt's “right to have rights” by affirming that “the entitlement to all civil rights—including rights to association, property, and contract—and eventually to political rights, must itself be considered a human right” (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004, 140), the entitlement clearly refers to a moral right. And when she writes that “[t]he human right to membership is not merely an abstract moral ‘ought’ but is increasingly incorporated into existing rights regimes through various practices and institutions” (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004, 142), she means that such moral rights are being translated into legal-institutional terms. But how has this happened, and how can it go further? Who is to realize these rights, and by what political means? Benhabib (Reference Benhabib2004, chap. 4) discusses recent European developments that give reason to hope for an expansion of the “right to have rights,” but it quickly becomes clear that they have come at the initiative of the judiciary rather than legislatures or potential rights bearers (see Honig Reference Honig and Benhabib2006). As with Habermas and Kant, we are provided with an attractive goal, but little sense of the politics that could realize it. As we will see, Benhabib and Habermas have essentially two lines of response to these questions: the first remains very close to the Kantian philosophy of right and shares its deficiencies; the second, although much more promising, remains underdeveloped and will set the stage for a third approach to the politics of human rights.

In his philosophy of right, Kant provides a clear answer to the question of how the pacific federation of republics he advocates is to be realized: whoever holds power should, as a matter of duty, reform the laws and constitution in a cosmopolitan-republican direction (see esp. Kant Reference Kant and Reiss1991, 162–64). The oft-diagnosed problem with this approach is its tendency to remain what Benhabib calls an “abstract moral ought”: to the extent that rulers, like powerful states, will have little incentive to give up their advantages and prerogatives, it seems unlikely that the desired order will come into being.Footnote ¹¹ Kant placed his hopes not only on duty, but also—as expressed in the passage quoted above that the emerging “universal community” ensures that “a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere”—on the effects of an expanding global public sphere, and contemporary theorists follow him here as well (e.g., Bohman Reference Bohman, Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann1997; Habermas Reference Habermas, Cronin and De Grieff1998, chap. 7). In a similar spirit, historians of human rights tend to represent the progress of human rights as a gradual work of collective conscience, while neo-Kantians speak of “learning processes”: legal-institutional improvements are in part the result of people's (and peoples’) reflection on humanity's self-inflicted disasters (e.g., Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004, 67; Habermas Reference Habermas and Pensky2001, chap. 3). The difficulty with this view of human rights politics is that, no less than the first, it relies on powerful states and bodies to pass and enforce the treaties and conventions of which this progress is composed. Human rights politics remains a politics of the stronger, not of those whose rights are at issue.

Now, there is another story that can be told about the rise of rights, based less on growing moral consensus than on how particular protections come into being. Norberto Bobbio suggests that we understand rights theories of the kind Arendt dismissed (natural rights, the social contract, etc.) as “imaginary reconstructions”: “As a theory variously developed by philosophers, theologians and jurists, the doctrine of the rights of man can be regarded as a later rationalization of the state of affairs resulting from the struggle many centuries earlier, especially in England, between the king and other social forces” (Bobbio Reference Bobbio, Ryle and Soper2000, 6–7). Rights, Bobbio insists, are won through struggle. Generalizing this thesis, he characterizes contractarian and natural rights theories as

Rather than imagining King John signing the Magna Carta because he was persuaded of the merits of baronial rights or decolonization resulting from imperialists’ insight into the contradiction between affirming universal rights and holding colonies, Bobbio sees justificatory theories as post facto rationalizations for gains won on the ground, through political action from below.

The notion that rights come into being because people organize to demand them is of course not news to political scientists.Footnote ¹² Nor is it alien to political theory. On Sheldon Wolin's view, for example, “rights in a democracy depend on the demos winning them, extending them substantively, and, in the process, . . . participating in power, reflecting on the consequences of its exercise, and struggling to sort out the common well-being” (Wolin Reference Wolin1996, 98). And, despite their Kantian emphasis on justification on the one hand and idealizing accounts of institutions on the other, we find the outlines of a contentious politics that can produce changes in laws and institutions in Habermas's and Benhabib's accounts. Habermas (Reference Habermas, Cronin and De Grieff1998, 208) writes of the “consistent actualization of the system of rights” through “a dialectic of de jure and de facto equality” triggered by the struggles of different groups. Benhabib (Reference Benhabib2004, 181) characterizes this process as “jurisgenerative politics”—“iterative acts through which a democratic people that considers itself bound by certain guiding norms and principles reappropriates and reinterprets these, thus showing itself to be not only the subject but also the author of the laws.” Both of them describe this politics, however, as it unfolds within constitutional democracies, “actualizing” rights that already exist de jure but not de facto. But what if, pace Benhabib, there is no preexisting political community within whose legal-political institutions rights can be claimed? What if, pace Habermas, there is no de jure equality, no constitutional framework within which rights can be ‘actualized’? What if, pace Wolin, there is neither a preexisting democracy nor a preexisting demos? Can we understand the creation of rights without presupposing the legal-institutional framework that is ultimately to safeguard them? As I will now argue, by shifting our focus from morality and law to politics itself, understood as the activity of the potential rights-bearers, we can see them as the authors of their rights in a deeper sense—not only ideally, from the standpoint of justification, and not only within the framework of a constitutional state, but actually, as they engage in the practice of claiming rights.

HUMAN RIGHTS POLITICS AS DEMOCRATIC ACTION

In the section “Human Rights as Implementation,” I showed how treating human rights as moral imperatives to be implemented by means of force can reinforce the very inequalities of power that rights seek to address. In “Human Rights Politics as Right,” I showed that the Kantian remedy solves this problem in theory, but not in practice: Although it can imagine an alternative, it tends to leave us suspended between an unsatisfactory present and a utopian future. For many of Kant's contemporary followers who practice normative or ideal political theory, this is simply a matter of specialization: normative theorists understand themselves as being in the business of arguing for just arrangements; the business of realizing them is another question. Yet I also indicated that some contemporary neo-Kantians go further, describing a politics in which present injustices can be contested in the name of right. What remains is to fill in this vision, to show how human rights can be understood as a practice and process whose means and end are the realization of equal freedom and dignity and yet can potentially go on beyond the confines of a state. To do so, I return once more to Arendt's “right to have rights.”

As recent commentators have shown (Birmingham Reference Birmingham2006; Isaac Reference Isaac1996; Parekh Reference Parekh2004), contrary to common depictions of Arendt as a human rights skeptic and devotee of the nation-state, she favored steps much like those called for by contemporary neo-Kantians. “Human dignity needs a new guarantee,” she wrote in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, “which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities” (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, ix). While Arendt refers here to “territorial entities” (without specifying how they should be “newly defined” or their relation to this “new law”), in a 1958 laudatio for Karl Jaspers she writes of a “new fragile unity” at a global level (Arendt Reference Arendt, Clara and Winston1968a, 93). This unity, she explains, “can be guaranteed only within a framework of universal mutual agreements, which eventually would lead into a world-wide federated structure.” This cosmopolitan strain runs throughout her later work, from her call for international criminal justice in Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt Reference Arendt1977, 268–69) to her praise for Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which recognizes treaties as binding (Arendt Reference Arendt1969, 108), to her affirmation in her late lectures on Kant that “[w]hen one judges and when one acts in political matter, one is supposed to take one's bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen . . .” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Beiner1992, 75–6).

Arendt did not pursue these reflections at any length and doubted the possibility of cosmopolitan politics in anything but the very long term. All the same, while she never elaborated on the “right to have rights,” the bases exist in her work for an alternative to the approaches I have considered so far. To uncover it, we must first see her distance from them. A starting point is provided by her discussion of the “right to have rights” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Pointing to the difficulty of giving this right concrete expression, Arendt (Reference Arendt1973, 298) warns:

International law, that is, cannot guarantee a right to have rights because, under the Westphalian or UN Charter system, it enshrines the principle of state sovereignty, and with it a ban on interfering in the internal affairs of other states. We might respond to Arendt's last point in this passage, however, by asking, Why wouldn't world government create “a sphere that is above the nations,” solving the problem of a right to have rights?—especially since Arendt immediately adds that a world state “is indeed within the realm of possibility.” For whether the problem is, as Ignatieff and Walzer suggest, that we lack a power or authority to enforce human rights, or, as Benhabib and Habermas suggest, that we lack laws and institutions to overcome the exclusivity of the nation-state,Footnote ¹³ world government, whatever its other disadvantages, would appear to solve it.

According to Benhabib (Reference Benhabib2004, 66), Arendt rejected this expedient because she, like Kant, feared a world state and failed to consider intermediate measures. Now, it is true that Arendt (Reference Arendt, Clara and Winston1968a, 61) regarded a world state as “not only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny” but as “the end of all political life as we know it.” But her account of why world government would not guarantee a right to have rights differs essentially from Kant's. Arendt (Reference Arendt1973, 298–99) writes:

This argument is, to say the least, peculiar: global government would not protect a right to have rights because it would not prevent part of humanity from violating the rights of the rest. Yet Arendt does not explain why this tendency would necessarily affect a world state, or why it would not affect any polity. Moreover, the very point of rights on most accounts—to check the excesses of majoritarianism and utilitarianism—appears to have escaped her.

To make sense of this argument we must return to an earlier moment in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The book's early chapters are mostly remembered today for their warnings about nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism, imperialism, and the rise of “the masses.” In her chapter on “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie,” however, Arendt's target is a form of statism she associates with modern liberalism. Anticipating her account in The Human Condition, here Arendt argues that the rising bourgeoisie won the freedom to accumulate capital and pursue its expansionist designs by transferring political matters to an all-powerful state. This abandonment of civic life, she claims, is the substance of Hobbes’ social contract, and has continued apace throughout the modern period, with the growth of the state and the retreat of the individual into private and economic affairs. In this context, she adds a footnote:

Here Arendt reveals her distance from the view that Benhabib attributes to her, namely that “exclusionary territorial control is an unchecked sovereign privilege which cannot be limited or trumped by other norms and institutions” (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004, 67). For what Arendt objects to is not the scope of such a politics (“exclusionary territorial control”), but its mode or form (“unchecked sovereign privilege”).Footnote ¹⁴ Arendt does not oppose a national-statist paradigm to “other norms and institutions” (a matter of scope), but to what she calls “authentic politics” (a matter of mode). The problem with the “liberal notion of a World Government” from Arendt's perspective is not that it is global, but that, like the Hobbesian state, it exercises power over people (or nations) rather than being constituted by them, out of “the full force of their power.” The problem is not one of scale, but of form.

Precisely this attention to the mode or form of politics—to whether power is exercised vertically, from above, or generated from below, by what Habermas calls the “horizontal relationships” among people—lies at the heart of Arendt's objection to Weberian as well as Kantian conceptions of politics. The clearest statement of her positive vision of “authentic politics” comes not, as is commonly thought, in The Human Condition (where she takes up the question of action rather than politics per se), but in her “Introduction into Politics” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Ludz1993, Reference Arendt, Woods and Kohn2005), which she began in German in 1956 but left unfinished. Here she distinguishes between the goals of politics, its ends, and its meaning. For Arendt the meaning (Sinn) of politics is freedom (Arendt Reference Arendt, Woods and Kohn2005, 108). To be sure, political action always pursues particular goals (Ziele); however, owing to the plurality and unpredictability of politics, these goals are seldom realized (Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 184).Footnote ¹⁵ Arendt reserves the term ends (Zwecke), in contrast, for broader purposes toward which action or politics as a whole strives.Footnote ¹⁶ “The meaning of a thing,” she explains, “is always contained within the thing itself. . . . It is just the opposite with ends; an end does not begin to become a reality until the activity that produced it has been concluded” (Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 193–94). The greatest threat to political life, in Arendt's view, is the reduction of politics to the pursuit of ends. “Even when the end is freedom,” she writes, “the meaning contained within such action [one employing brute force] itself is coercion by violence” (Arendt Reference Arendt, Woods and Kohn2005, 198). By identifying politics with the realization of ends, she fears, we reduce it to instrumental action, and thus, like Weber, to force, domination, and rule. Indeed, Arendt's political thought as a whole can be read as a refutation of this means-ends model.Footnote ¹⁷

At the same time that Arendt rejects the model of politics as domination that I associated with Weber, she also rejects the Kantian reduction of politics to morality and law. Though far from indifferent to law, Arendt consistently regards it as secondary to politics itself. On the “Greek” model of The Human Condition, for instance, she likens laws to the city walls, which create a space for politics (e.g., Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 194); on the “Roman” model of On Revolution, law secures relationships, founds authority, and provides continuity (e.g., Arendt Reference Arendt1965, 116; Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 334). But for her, laws and constitutions are not in and of themselves politics, only its framework and among its more important results. In contrast to these views, Arendt's ideal of politics is neither republican (defined by the good of the community) nor liberal (defined by rights and laws and the private, individual freedom they allow). Instead, it is what she calls isonomia, the idea not “that all are equal before the law . . . but rather simply that all have the same claim to political activity [Tätigkeit]” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Ludz1993, 40; cf. Arendt Reference Arendt1965, 22–3). For Arendt this activity is politics—the practices of interaction and mutual recognition, conflict and cooperation, through which people construct a common public-political sphere.

With this move Arendt seeks to reorient politics away from the use of power from above, away from individual or collective will, away from laws and institutions, and toward what she calls “the world” or “the in-between”—the intersubjective “space of appearances” between people. The meaning or significance (Sinn) of politics for her lies in creating and maintaining such a space of political freedom, a realm in which people can be recognized as interlocutors, as equal partners in action and deliberation. This equality is not given from above and does not consist principally in laws or institutions but is achieved through practice. “We are not born equal,” Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism; “we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (Arendt, Reference Arendt1973, 301).Footnote ¹⁸ Rights are not in the first instance a matter of philosophical or moral ideals, state guarantees or legal declarations, but are created from the bottom up, through practices of communication and interaction. They are part and parcel of, emerging with and through, political activity itself. If, as Serena Parekh (Reference Parekh2004) puts it, a ‘right to have rights’ amounts to the right “to a meaningful place in the world,” we must understand “world” in the specifically Arendtian sense—as a sphere made up of political relations among people who recognize one another as peers. This is why Arendt emphasizes that the most important deprivation visited upon the stateless was “not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion” (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 296). “Action” and “opinion” for Arendt are not generically human; they are specifically political, and actualized only in practice. This, as I will show shortly, is why Étienne Balibar (Reference Balibar1994, 212) is correct to interpret Arendt's “right to have rights” as “the right to politics.”

Arendt's alternative to goals or ends in directing political action is what she calls principles (Prinzipien)—not moral or legal principles, but, following Montesquieu, the spirit animating individual and collective action (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 329–36; Reference Arendt1968b, 151–53).Footnote ¹⁹ This, I suggest, is what she means in The Origins of Totalitarianism when she refers to a “new political principle” that could provide human dignity with a “new guarantee.” It is likewise behind her comment on Jaspers’ cosmopolitanism of “universal mutual agreements”: “For this, political philosophy can hardly do more than describe and prescribe a new principle of political action” (Arendt Reference Arendt, Clara and Winston1968a, 93; emphasis in original). What Arendt means by a “sphere that is above the nations” is not a sphere of (international) law or (state or world-state) sovereignty, but a sphere of freedom animated by such a principle. The reason the problem of the right to have rights “would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a world government”—why “it is by no means certain” whether “the right of every individual to belong to humanity” could “be guaranteed by humanity itself”—is that while law and even state power could in principle be universalized, she doubted that such a sphere of politics could be, for that would entail extending this specifically political form of recognition and interaction to literally everyone. Thus, Arendt's doubts about human rights are based neither on a fetishization of national citizenship nor on the lack of a power or law to enforce rights. Rather, they stem from what she regarded as limits to practices of mutual recognition.

Although Arendt was not a political cosmopolitan in a conventional sense, then, she suggests a notion of rights politics that makes it prior to and partially independent of the state, law, and morality. She does so, I have tried to show, by reinterpreting inherited political notions from the bottom up rather than the top down, as practices. The politics of rights can be thought with Arendt as the active practice of those who recognize each another as equals. This practice is internal to politics, at once its effect and its precondition, one of its main objects and one of its most important results. Crucially, its scope is set, not by state boundaries or legal jurisdictions, but by political action itself. As she writes of the Greek polis, “it is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 198). As Jeffrey Isaac (Reference Isaac1996, 71) explains, “the most important focus of such a politics is neither the nation-state nor the international covenant or tribunal”; rather, “the primary impetus for such rights will always come from elsewhere, from the praxis of citizens who insist upon these rights and who are prepared to back up this insistence through political means.” Since this politics rests on the activity of those who practice it, “[h]ow human rights claims are articulated and mobilized can and will vary from case to case and from time to time, as political identities are transformed and new alliances are forged” (Isaac Reference Isaac1996, 71). This active, bottom-up vision can thus serve as the basis for a democratic but nonstatist politics of rights.

If Arendt shows how rights politics can be understood as the activity of potential rights holders themselves, however, we need to look beyond her to see how this can be true of human rights. This is not because of any communitarianism or statism on her part, but because she insisted on confining politics to the present, to the plane of immanence. For her a principle like “human rights” is bound to its immediate context of use: “The manifestation of principles comes about only through action,” she writes; “they are manifest in the world as long as the action lasts, but no longer” (Arendt Reference Arendt1968b, 152). As Claude Lefort (Reference Lefort and Macey1988, chap. 3) argues, this restriction loses sight of the productively indeterminate ways in which principles inspire action. Lefort sees the political force of human rights in precisely this function: he interprets human rights as a “generative principle” of politics, one with its own “symbolic efficacy” (Lefort Reference Lefort and Thompson1986, 260). If people's felt sense of the importance of human rights can help secure the legitimacy of a political order when it guarantees them, it can also provide a basis for contesting that order when it does not. Unlike for Habermas, however, for Lefort it is not the constitutional availability of these principles that matters so much as how they unfold on the level of political imagination, where they create a new “awareness of right” (Lefort Reference Lefort and Thompson1986, 264).

For Lefort, if human rights are not extra- or prepolitical, neither should they be regarded primarily as a precondition or framework for politics. Rather, they are the product of past struggles and the object of present ones. Far from being the apolitical basis of politics, rights are vehicles of politicization: political movements arise to expand old rights or claim new ones. Rights are not established in principle and then protected by power, be it by that of one's own state or another; they are invented and reinvented by particular actors through the very practice of claiming them. In this way, Lefort (Reference Lefort and Thompson1986, 258) insists, the principle of human rights “eludes all power which would claim to take hold of it. . . . [T]hese rights go beyond any particular formulation which has been given of them; and this means that their formulation contains the demand for their reformulation. . . .” The continual availability of these open-ended rights transforms politics into “the theatre of a contestation, whose object cannot be reduced to the preservation of a tacitly established pact but which takes form in centres that power cannot entirely master” (Lefort Reference Lefort and Thompson1986, 258). These centers outside the official political realm—civil society, or what Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser and Calhoun1992) has called “subaltern counterpublics”—are the fragile but endlessly renewable source of democratic politics.

We are now better able to see why Étienne Balibar equates “the right to have rights” with a “right to politics.” Reflecting, like Arendt, on the relation between the terms juxtaposed in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Balibar draws an opposite conclusion to hers. Whereas Arendt viewed the conjunction of man and citizen negatively, in terms of its de facto results, so that the gap between them reveals why the “loss of national rights was identical with the loss of human rights” (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 292), Balibar regards it positively, in terms of its implications. For Balibar, the overlap of man and citizen affirms “a universal right to political activity for every individual, in all the domains in which the problem of collectively organized possession, power, and knowledge is posed” (Balibar Reference Balibar1994, 212). He stresses that human rights’ indeterminacy, the fact that they cannot be exhausted by any particular instantiation, means that they are always potentially transformative. The politics of human rights, he claims, “always supposes . . . that an existing social order is put into question, even if it be the democratic and juridical order of a constitutional state that, within certain limits and within a certain field, institutes freedom and equality” (Balibar Reference Balibar1994, 224).

Human rights are thus on this account a principle internal to modern politics that always potentially exceeds the limits of any given political order or community. Because this “right to politics” is a right to action, Balibar insists, it can only be “a right of everyone on his or her own behalf ”—which signifies, “among other things, that no one can be liberated or emancipated by others, from ‘above,’ even were this ‘above’ to be right [in the Kantian sense] itself, or the democratic state” (Balibar Reference Balibar1994, 212–13). The right to politics is a right to autonomous political action. Moreover, the juxtaposition of “man” and “citizen,” of the simply human and the political, means that the claim to human rights is always potentially universal: “there is an inherent contradiction in the idea that not every human being enjoys rights which are constitutive of humanity” (Balibar Reference Balibar1994, 165). A rights claim can potentially be made by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Human rights have thus become a central site of the emancipatory logic of modern politics, an expression of how the principle of equal freedom cannot be contained with existing institutions or conceptions of right but rather invites its extension to new domains, settings, and scales. Most importantly, by reading the right to have rights as a right to politics, as the activation of the principle of equal freedom, Balibar decisively affirms it as a principle of political action.

This supplies the key to an active, bottom-up politics of human rights that can go on beyond any existing constitutional framework. I find a culmination of this image of human rights in a recent essay by Jacques Rancière (Reference Rancière2004). Rancière begins his discussion by exposing the inadequacies of Arendt's account.Footnote ²⁰ It is because Arendt regards politics as a “sphere” rather than a “process,” he argues, that she concludes that human rights are “in fact” nothing:

Against this, Rancière insists that the politics of human rights consists precisely in the activity of claiming them. For him, rights become political when they are denied and this denial is contested; they must be put to work to be realized. This reflects Rancière's more general view that politics consists in nothing other than testing the boundaries of democracy, freedom, or equality by setting their open-ended promise against their all-too particular instantiations (Rancière Reference Rancière and Rose1998). Human rights are thus an exemplary case of the process by which political institutions or communities are forced to become more inclusive or egalitarian by challenges from their outside.

Rancière (Reference Rancière2004, 302) sums up this version of human rights politics with a characteristically paradoxical formula: “the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.” The basis of this double paradox is a reading of the Declaration that neither, like Arendt, separates the rights of man from the rights of the citizen, nor, like Balibar, identifies them. Instead, Rancière insists that the rights of man have two distinct meanings, and only become a politics when these meanings are played off against each other. In one sense, human rights “are written rights,” the “inscriptions of the community as free and equal.” But they are also “the rights of those who make something of that inscription, who decide not only to ‘use’ their rights but also to build such and such a case. . .” (Rancière Reference Rancière2004, 303). Illustrating, he explains that women who campaigned for full citizenship during the French Revolution

This process superficially resembles Habermas's dialectic of de jure and de facto equality: the state de facto denied women rights that it de jure granted them as human beings, and they responded by putting those rights into practice, by de facto acting as citizens. But Rancière also shows how the de facto practice of claiming rights exceeded their de jure inscription. The active assertion of political equality can go beyond given definitions of rights (which in this case restricted them to men) by demonstrating, through the very activity of claiming rights, that they can apply to women as well. In the event, of course, the claim failed; Frenchwomen would not win the franchise for more than 150 years. But for Rancière the episode illustrates how the conflictual scene of democratic politics possesses its own, internal normativity in an open-ended appeal to citizenship, understood not as a legal status but as political action. From this perspective, human rights are an always-available resource for those who have been denied rights they can plausibly claim. We should expect this to occur, on Rancière's account, not on the basis of a consensus about rights but precisely through the opposite—through dissensus about their meaning, application, and extension. Rights on this view depend on their experimental activation by those to whom they could but do not (yet) apply.

Would Arendt recognize this conflictual, expansive politics as a version of her own? Perhaps not. I have tried to suggest, however, that insofar as she conceives of rights not as a status but as an activity, it is at least possible that wherever this activity goes on, a politics of rights, and thus a “demonstration” of the right to have rights, can occur. For Arendt, it is actual relations of recognition that define the scope and content of politics. While she does not deny that the dimensions of this sphere can change, she does not explain how. Here I have suggested that we should go beyond her. Yet a curious fact of Arendt's biography casts unexpected light on her position. Despite her praise of citizenship, the only time Arendt actually devoted to the vita activa, setting aside philosophy for activism, was when she was stateless. As her biographer notes, “this period when she had no political rights—between her flight from Nazi Germany in 1933 and her receipt of American citizenship in 1951—was her most active politically” (Young-Bruehl Reference Young-Bruehl2004, 113). This may seem peculiar if we regard Arendt as a communitarian thinker concerned only with positive rights in a national political sphere, but not if we read her as a thinker of the creation of rights. Then, with Rancière, we will not be surprised that she only found herself compelled to practice politics when she was, on the narrow conception with which she is too often identified, excluded from the political sphere. And we will understand the “right to have rights” as activated only when human rights are put into practice in an effort to expand the conditions for participation in political life.

This image of human rights politics corresponds to recent efforts to redefine citizenship not simply as a legal status, but as a form of collective action that often comes in response to its absence (e.g., Isin Reference Isin2002). Such a politics may arise to demand status within a nation-state, like the women's movement evoked by Rancière. Thus, Monika Krause (Reference Krause2008, 343) depicts the activism of sans papiers in different European countries as constituting an Arendtian “portable polis,” “creat[ing] spaces of public freedom.” But it can in principle emerge wherever people organize to claim rights they have been denied—not only within the framework of a constitutional state, but against any authority that should be more accountable to those over whom it wields power. To be sure, this politics will be shaped by the actions of those who possess sovereign power as well as by the availability of appropriate laws and institutions. However, by identifying human rights politics first and foremost with the activity of rights claimants, not only do we see its root in felt needs and its intrinsic connection to the principle of autonomy; we also make clear how these needs and this principle find direct practical expression. I conclude, then, by showing how this image of human rights, taken alongside the others, can provide a surer normative and practical guide to the politics of human rights than either of the others alone.