On Revolution: The Fragility of Rights

Abstract

Rights for Arendt are part of this man-made, artificial world. Thus, for her, we have a responsibility to care for and maintain political rights. This is the impertive her politics expresses. However, what Arendt considers an “appropriate” right for our care is clouded by her unease with “the social”: when the social creeps into the field of concern, political rights are destabilized. The introduction of this idea of “the social” raises some very serious concerns about exactly what Arendt accepts as “political,” and about whom she will accept as political actors. Because of this concern with the social, she will make a distinction between the “good man” and the “good citizen”—an echo of her Augustinian neighbor. She limits the political to the abstracted concerns of the citizen, and, for her, it is only when we can overcome the messiness of everyday interests that we might be able to be appropriately engaged. Much as she articulated a purified neighbor of futurity in Love and Saint Augustine, in On Revolution she reasons that we must sacrifice “man” to “citizen.”