A new guarantee on earth: Hannah Arendt on human dignity and the politics of human rights

While the writings of Hannah Arendt have received an extraordinary amount of scholarly attention, few commentators have seen her as a theorist concerned with questions of human rights. I argue that the problem of human rights was central to Arendt's political theory. While she does not elaborate a theory of human rights as such, and while she avoids the juridical approaches so common among human lights theorists and advocates, her conception of political action is intended to secure an elemental human dignity that is systematically jeopardized by the imperatives of national sovereignty.