The Right to Have Rights, or the Right to Claim Rights? (Arendtian Reflection on the Politics of Claiming Rights)

In the Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt illuminates a peculiar paradox in the nature of liberalism, when he describes it as a political ideology with fundamentally anti-political aims. On the one hand, liberalism aims to displace the political agon through an imposition of a legal order capable of settling all differences. On the other hand, liberalism itself is a political ideology that promotes a particular vision of political and social order against competing visions. What makes liberalism from Schmitt’s point of view hypocritical is that it describes its own values as universally valid human values, thus delegitimising and dehumanising its opponents. This paradoxical feature of liberalism is reflected in the political strategy of advancing one’s political cause through appealing to civil or human rights. The appeal to constitutionally or otherwise legally guaranteed rights is supposed to serve as a trump in the political contest, to resolve the disputed issues once for all by effectively removing them from the field of political decision-making. Nevertheless, the very act of claiming rights is in and of itself a political act. In this paper, I would like to reflect upon the paradoxical nature of the politics of claiming rights through a deconstructive reading of Hannah Arendt’s understanding of politics. Arendt is often described as an opponent of liberalism who favours the republican understanding of liberty as a right to partake in the political decision-making against its liberal rendering as a sphere of personal autonomy protected by the shield of rights. Nevertheless, practically all modern examples of genuinely political action that Ardent refers to can be described as instances of claiming (civil or political) rights. This obviously leads to the question, what, according to her, should be the actual content of the political action once the issue rights has been settled. Ultimately, I shall argue that the extent and meaning of these rights, just like the contents of the political action in Arendt’s sense, can never be settled, because it is itself a subject of political contestation. The primary aims of this paper are threefold: (1) To contribute to the interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s political theory. (2) To elucidate the ambivalent nature and the limitations of the politics of claiming rights. (3) To contribute to the current debate about the possible advantages of the republican (as opposed to the liberal) understanding of freedom.