Citizen of the Polis and Citizen of the World. Hannah Arendt on Human and Civic Rights

Arendt’s reflections on the critical issues of Human Rights still hold relevance after seventy years: the news reports the baffling condition of immigrants, refugees, sans papier and people trying to cross borders towards a better life daily. These people are still forced to live outside the law as the displaced persons have been since the two World wars. Arendt’s claim on the emptiness of human rights – which are guaranteed only when they are citizens’ rights - has been discussed by French philosophers like Rancière and Balibar. These philosophers affirms the effectiveness of human rights for political action: Rancière states that human rights open the political space for the inclusion of the excluded; for Balibar human rights are both extensively and intensively universal, that is, they exclude exclusion. Contrastingly, the Italian jurist Agamben radicalizes Arendt’s thesis: human rights are the means for an original violence towards men, because their exclusive inclusion pins them to bare life. This paper aims to discuss these reading on the matter of human rights, focusing on Arendt’s constitutional politics. Her discussion on the birth of the United States reveals that she considered the horizontal and vertical multiplication of power institutions as the core solution against both political exclusion and institutional weakening. Universal institutions do not exclude local ones, but they strengthen each other. Arendt’s idea offers a way to rethink humanity and universal inclusion, through concrete institutions which make rights effective.