What next, if we lose ‘the right to have rights’? A roundtable discussion.
Wednesday 4 June 2025, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Colin Matthew Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building
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Writing in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt questioned the basic premise of human rights, arguing that without state protection there was ‘nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’. For Arendt, humans were not born with inalienable rights, as the newly formed United Nations proclaimed. Rather, ‘we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’. In other words, it was the state and embedded social and political relationships that guaranteed ‘the right to have rights’. One effective line of attack on both these guarantors has been to conceal the nature of the threats and induce a state of confusion around every point of certainty. Some deceptions would eventually be exposed, but only when it was too late to contain the disasters – the cancer, the poisoned air and earth, the crumbling shorelines, the landslides, the heatwaves, the wild storms, the faltering ecosystems, the dead forests, the despair, the disengagement. In any case, the deceptions’ exposure would only add to the confusion, to the wilderness of fearful anger. Now the right to have rights seems to be in the process of vanishing even for the most privileged parts of the world. This means that the possibility of its loss is finally visible to everyone – if only through the triumphalism of those who viciously celebrate the moment. It seems that guarantors of rights have not after all been defended, nor re-imagined with new capabilities to suit the times, nor emboldened by urgency. They have atrophied through neglect and by design.
It is a clarifying moment. If now is not a time to reassert and reimagine the rights of all the mutually dependent communities of earth’s narrow biosphere – it can only be a time for surrender.
And so the speakers on this roundtable offer ways to think in the context of today’s emergencies. Given a warming world, a contracting public sphere, and rapidly shifting geopolitical alignments, where are we to locate – and how are we to imagine – the rights of humans and non-humans? Who might act as their guarantors? And what is the role of the humanities in these tasks of the committed imagination?
