Markell, Patchen. "Review of Birmingham's HANNAH ARENDT AND HUMAN RIGHTS & Parekh's HANNAH ARENDT AND THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY." NDPR (Dec. 2008).

Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: the Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Parekh, Serena. Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: a Phenomenology of Human Rights. London: Routledge, 2008. In the years following the Second World War, Hannah Arendt identified a deadly irony in the history of the idea of human rights. Appeals to human rights had long been understood as a means of protecting individuals against the nation-states to which (it was assumed) they belonged. Yet precisely because human rights discourse took national membership and the coextensivity of nations and states for granted, the idea of human rights proved disastrously impotent just when it was needed most: when the crisis of the nation-state and the rise of totalitarianism produced and then destroyed stateless persons on a mass scale. Half a century later, political philosophers concerned with the vulnerable status of refugees, migrants, and national minorities in the wake of the Cold War rediscovered Arendt's critique of human rights, as well as her effort to reorient human rights discourse around the idea of a fundamental right to belong, or a "right to have rights" -- even as some of them, most influentially Seyla Benhabib, worried that Arendt's reconstructed conception of human rights lacked sufficiently strong "normative foundations." One response to this concern might be to insist that it is misplaced: that Arendt herself would have rejected the demand for foundations as a manifestation of the relentless subordination of political freedom to philosophical certitude in what she called "the tradition" of Western political philosophy. These two recently published books on Arendt and human rights, by Peg Birmingham and Serena Parekh, adopt a different strategy. Responding directly to objections like Benhabib's, Birmingham and Parekh argue in different ways that Arendt did indeed try to provide a new foundation for human rights, but that the foundation she offered was of a distinctive, unfamiliar kind. Generally speaking, both authors suggest that Arendt anchors human rights not in an account of human "nature" (that is, in a characterization of human beings in terms of a set of properties shared by each member of the species), but in a picture of the human "condition" (that is, in a phenomenological characterization of the basic features of human beings' worldly existence). Such phenomenological foundations don't possess the compulsory force of logical deductions, but they may nevertheless help to strengthen the commitment to human rights by showing us how such a commitment harmonizes with (and can thus draw sustenance from) a potentially persuasive broader portrait of human being. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14788.