Crisis of the Nation-State and the Dialectic of Human Rights in Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism as collapse of political forms

Abstract

The article argues a lecture of H. Arendt’s The burden of our times (1951), which takes into account this work as an analysis of the causes that led to the crisis and fall of the modern Nation-state, displaying the elements which brought forth the most destructive experiment which the political condition of man was subjected to, i.e. the totalitarian phenomenon. I shall begin by outlining the reasons of Arendt’s disdain for the rules of sociological method, since she considers that human actions can only retrospectively illuminate which are the elements that actually led to the historical events. Secondly, I tackle the incompatibility that Arendt highlights between political and boundless economic enrichment with the help of the criticism she addressed to Hobbes’s Leviathan, that would be guilty of granting theoretical legitimacy to the specific needs of a rising class, the bourgeoisie. Imperialism would thus be the logical consequence of forgetting the principle that commands men transforming the earth as a habitable place, inserting in it a system of legal mediations. Finally, I will deal with the criticism of Arendt on human rights —near to the criticism that she leveled at the nationalism concealed by every national state, whose content she drastically reduces to the requirement of belonging effectively to a political community. Concerning this topic I aim at exploring the possibilities for setting up a dialogue with Kant’s Doctrine of Right, which also assesses the foundation of a civil union as an essential condition for upholding human rights.