Recovering Humanity from Man: Hannah Arendt's Troubled Cosmopolitanism

Taking its inspiration from Patricia Owens' important and original new book on Hannah Arendt and international relations, this essay considers how Arendt's many scattered remarks on humanity, world order and cosmopolitanism work for us today – a time when a worthwhile ‘cosmopolitanisation’ of international law (such that its subjects are individual humans as much as states) coexists with darker appropriations of the idea of humanity to legitimise coercive interventions and liberal imperialism. Whilst agreeing with Owens that Arendt's thought offers us significant critical tools to question the latter, I depart from Arendt's general scepticism of a moral subject called humanity, and argue that the time has come to reaffirm, rather than question, what is especially sacred in ‘the abstract nakedness of being human’.