Vida y derecho en Hannah Arendt

Abstract

In his entire work, and most clearly in The human condition (1958), Arendt strives to indicate the artificial character of political life, its dissociation from mere living and even its opposition to the necessities associated with mere life. In The origins of totalitarianism (1951) she insists that the nature does not found the right, as demonstrated by the stateless person in his “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human”. In this sense, Arendt argues that the only fundamental right is the right to have rights, the right to belong to a political community and to be judged by words and actions. In his text “We refugees” (1943), however, Arendt points out, starting from his own experience of being a refugee, the central role of the integrity of the private life for participation in political life. There is a dignity associated with mere living and the private life that allows us to interpret the right to have rights as the right to not be irrevocably converted in a stranger in the world.