Between politics and law : Hannah Arendt and the subject of rights

Arguably the best-known and most frequently cited text in all of Arendt's work-certainly in recent years-is the famous section of The Origins of Totalitarianism on 'The Perplexities of the Rights of Man', in which she argues that stateless people and refugees expose the limits of so-called human rights, inasmuch as these rights appear suddenly to vanish at precisely that moment when they might be required or invoked-that is, when one is no longer a citizen of a particular State, but a mere human, or nothing more than a human being. And arguably the most frequently-cited phrase in that text is 'the right to have rights', or the right, as Arendt puts it, to 'belong to some kind of organized community'. 1 But if the phrase 'the right to have rights' is well-known, it has not been especially well-received. More than a few commentators have pointed out its manifest circularity, or the sense in which it seems to place an effect before its cause. How can one have a right, they wonder, before one has any rights? And if one could have such a thing, than would not the same stateless people and refugees who, in Arendt's estimation, reveal the paucity of all universal rights also reveal, and more explicitly reveal, that of 'the right to have rights'? In what sense might it make sense to speak of a right to have rights?