Comments: Giuseppe Ballacci (CEHUM) and Valerio Nitrato Izzo (CES).

Abstract

Hannah Arendt concludes her seminal essay “The Jew as Pariah” with the following remark in 1944.
[O]nly within the framework of a people can a man live as a man among men, without exhausting himself. And only when a people lives and
functions in consort with other peoples can it contribute to the establishment upon earth of a commonly conditioned and commonly controlled humanity.

The notions of “peoplehood” and “humanity” reside at the heart of the political conclusions that Arendt draws from the catastrophic events of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. On the one hand, the fate of the European Jewry makes it clear for her that a political community providing its members with legal status and a place in the world is a fundamental human good. She defends a Jewish politics of peoplehood in light of this
insight, maintaining that Jews must take collective action as a people and organize themselves into a body politic. On the other hand, vis-à-vis the horrors of totalitarianism and its unprecedented assault on human dignity, Arendt highlights the necessity of an organized humanity. According to her, the calamities of the 20th century demand with unmistakable urgency the establishment of a global framework of responsibility beyond and above sovereign nations. These considerations present her with a difficult question: how to intertwine the politics of peoplehood―i.e. a politics of “collective identity” and “bounded community”―with the idea of common humanity?

In this paper, I explore how Hannah Arendt grappled with this question, primarily in her early writings, including the numerous essays on Jewish identity and politics, and the first two volumes of The Origins of Totalitarianism. I begin with an account of Arendt’s reflections on the “Jewish question” with a view to unfolding her critical take on both Enlightenment humanism and the nationalist politics of mainstream Zionism (Section 1). Then, exploring her defense of a binational Jewish-Arab federation in Palestine, I argue that, in republican acts of foundation expressive of a political will to live together, Arendt sees an alternative to essentialist models of peoplehood based on ethnic belonging and cultural homogeneity, i.e., an alternative mode of collective identity which is compatible with a moral consciousness responsive to the idea of common
humanity (Section 2). The next section focuses on the limits of republican acts of foundation. More specifically, it offers an analysis of Arendt’s memorable plea for a “right to have rights” and frames the tension between peoplehood and humanity in view of the dilemmas of bounded community (Section 3). Finally, in the last part of the paper, I take up the question of what normative lessons we can draw from Arendt’s insights (and impasses) with regards to the tension between peoplehood and humanity today.
 

Bio

Serdar Tekin holds a BA and an MA in philosophy. Currently, he is completing his PhD in political science at the University of Toronto, Canada; and working as a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Ege University, Turkey. While his “disciplinary” fields of specialization are political theory and the history of philosophy, his “topical” research interests turn on the politics of founding, deliberative democracy, and the relations between practical reason, reflective judgment and political narratives.   

His doctoral dissertation explores the concept of “political founding” in terms of its implications for a normative theory of democracy. More specifically, he focuses on three interlocking issues: (1) the concept of “the people” and the legitimacy of constitutional authorship; (2) the role of founding moments/events in reshaping political culture and collective identity; and (3) the tension between novelty and permanence in democratic politics. In articulating and addressing these issues, he primarily engages with the work of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas.

Giuseppe Ballacci is a FCT Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Minho (CEHUM). He holds a PhD in Political Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University (2008), the Departments of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research (2006-2007), and the Centre for International Relations at the King’s College of London (2005). His areas of interest are Contemporary Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and Rhetoric. In his doctoral dissertation he  tried to bring to the fore the multifaceted significance of ancient rhetoric for contemporary political theory. Currently, he is developing his research focusing on related issues such as political judgment, the relation between theory and practice, and the limits of rational deliberation.

Valerio Nitrato Izzo é licenciado em Direito pela Universidade de Nápoles “Federico II”, onde obteve também Doutoramento em Filosofia do Direito: Arte e técnica da Jurisprudência – Hermenêutica dos Direitos Humanos. Estudou na European Academy of Legal Theory em Bruxelas onde obteve um mestrado em Teoria do Direito.
Actualmente é pós-doutorando no Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra onde desenvolve o projecto de investigação “O impacto da catástrofe sobre os sistemas jurídicos: estratégias de regulação e protecção contra a vulnerabilidade social. O papel do Estado entre estatualismo, cosmopolitismo e pós-colonialismo” sob orientação dos Prof. Doutores António Casimiro Ferreira e José Manuel Mendes.

Seminar linked ro the research groups Humanities, Migration and Peace Studies (NHUMEP) and Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe)