Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed to be “inalienable,” irreducible to and undeducible from other rights or laws, no authority was invoke for their establishment; Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal. No special law, moreover, was deemed necessary to protect them because all laws were supposed to rest upon them. Man appeared as the only sovereign in matters of law as the people was proclaimed the only sovereign in matters of government. The people’s sovereignty (different from that of the prince) was not proclaimed by the grace of God but in the name of Man, so that it seemed only natural that the “inalienable” rights of man would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to sovereign self-government.
In other words, man had hardly appeared as
a completely emancipated, completely isolated being who carried his dignity
within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he
disappeared again into a member of a people.
From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of
inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an “abstract” human being
who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of social
order. If a tribal or other “backward”
community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it
had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and
national sovereignty, but was oppressed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights,
therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national
emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own
people, seemed to be able to ensure them.
As mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a
family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not
the individual, was the image of man.
The full implication of this identification of
the rights of man with the rights of the peoples in the European nation-state
system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly
appeared whose elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary
functioning of nation-states in the middle of Europe as they would have been in
the heart of Africa. The Rights of Man,
after all, had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be
independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings
lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no
authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee
them. Or when, in the case of minorities, an international body arrogated to itself
a nongovernmental authority, as failure was apparent even before its measures
were fully realized; not only were the governments more or less openly opposed
to this encroachment on their sovereignty, but the concerned nationalities
themselves did not recognize a non-national guarantee, mistrusting everything
which was not clear-cut support of their “national” (as opposed to their mere “linguistic,
religious, and ethnic”) rights, and preferred either, like the Germans or
Hungarians, to turn to the protection of the “national” mother country, or,
like the Jews, to turn to some kind of interterritorial solidarity.[1]
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
[1] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1976), pp.
291-292. See Chapter 9 “The Decline of
the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”, especially Section II “The
Perplexities of the Rights of Man”, pp. 290-302.
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