Péter D. Szigeti (University of Turku) has posted Hannah Arendt’s Doppelgängers: The Creation of Rightlessness and the Right to Have (Private) Rights on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
After decades of thinking about how to expand the protections of human rights to all of humanity, today the opposite is taking place: the creation of rightlessness is back in vogue. The undocumented—illegal immigrants, stateless persons and refugees—are in the vanguard for dispossessing and deporting large numbers of residents; others may follow later. Rightlessness demands engagement with Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the right to have rights,” and its many interpretations. In this Article, I argue that “the right to have rights” is fundamentally a private law right: the type of freedom and belonging that Hannah Arendt found lacking can best be secured simply through the right to contract and rights to property. This Article analyses both Hannah Arendt’s claims about “the right to have rights,” and the legal history of the last hundred and fifty years, to trace a tradition of fundamental private law rights that was eminently cosmopolitan, and the closest thing to universal law. Ironically, it was destroyed by its progeny, the human rights revolution. The life and death of the cosmopolitan private law tradition is examined through the cases of Max Stoeck and Friedrich Nottebohm, whom I call “Arendt’s doppelgängers.” Stoeck and Nottebohm, like Arendt, were German emigres and stateless refugees who were also interned, detained and their property was confiscated. Before that, however, they were also the beneficiaries this cosmopolitan legal tradition, which allowed emigrés to become successful without having any immigration status. The creation of rightlessness today is tied more and more to requiring documentation, and blocking private transactions, than to citizenship or statelessness.
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