Nationstate and the Stateless: Hannah Arendt on the End of Human Rights

Description: Part II of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism ends with a haunting disquisition on the decline of the nation state and the end of human rights in the period leading up to the Great War that broke out in August, 1914. Along with Part I which contains Arendt’s history of anti-Semitism, we get what, in the German version, she calls the origins and elements of totalitarianism, a new and unprecedented form of government. In light of the global crisis of migration and ever more urgent calls for closing borders and mass deportations, this talk reexamines Arendt’s thesis of a nexus between the demise of the European system of nation states, the phenomenon of stateless people, and the rise of totalitarian regimes, and asks whether we can learn something from Arendt for today.