For Hannah Arendt, the age of liberal democracy, beginning with the twinned revolutions of the late eighteenth century in America and France and continuing on to the Holocaust, rested on an intractable paradox.1 The systemic shifts that inaugurated this era moved the basis of political sovereignty from the monarch and to the people. Underpinning this change was the establishment of a legal framework that rested on human rights, the notion that our very humanness entitles us to live and think politically. These rights can be positive and pertain to, say, the freedoms of movement, speech, faith, and political identification, or they can be protective, shielding us from the excesses and violence of state power. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt is a humanist and can, accordingly, see the utopian virtues of this model, but ultimately, in the wake of the program of mass murder enacted across Europe in...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
June 1, 2020
Book Review|
June 01 2020
Rights in a Time of Crisis
The Novel of Human Rights
. By Dawes, James. Cambridge, MA
: Harvard Univ. Press
. 2018
. 232 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color
. By Parikh, Crystal. Minneapolis
: Univ. of Minnesota Press
. 2017
. 326 pp. Cloth, $112.00; paper, $28.00.Radical Intellect: “Liberator” Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s
. By Tinson, Christopher M.. Chapel Hill
: Univ. of North Carolina Press
. 2017
. xiii, 330 pp. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95; e-book, $19.99.The Virtues of Exit: On Resistance and Quitting Politics
. By Kirkpatrick, Jennet. Chapel Hill
: Univ. of North Carolina Press
. 2017
. x, 163 pp. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $24.95; e-book, $19.99.American Literature (2020) 92 (2): 343–356.
Citation
Edward Sugden; Rights in a Time of Crisis. American Literature 1 June 2020; 92 (2): 343–356. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267768
Download citation file:
Advertisement
120
Views