Marginalia · Justice
JU · P07
The Place
the right to have rights
Five rooms, and nobody was cruel in any of them.
A junta of fourteen learned men, properly convened, who heard both sides and issued no finding. A test of punishment so humane that every civilised jurisdiction adopted it. A building designed to end the whip, in which the watching need never happen. A prison reform that worked, and whose success was measured in how quiet the women had become. A court invented to be merciful, in which a family was consumed over four generations without one wrong step being taken by anybody.
Every one of them an improvement on what came before. Not a villain in the section.
This page is not another mechanism. It is the limit.
The only one it happened to
She fled Germany in 1933, the year she was briefly held by the Gestapo. In 1937 the state she had been born into stripped her of its citizenship. In 1940, after France fell, she was interned — by France, as an enemy alien, on account of the German nationality she no longer possessed — first in Paris and then at Gurs in the south.
She got out because a group of women inside the camp obtained forged release papers and persuaded several hundred prisoners to walk out through the gate before the Vichy administration tightened. Most of those who stayed were later sent to Auschwitz.
She reached New York in 1941 with travel documents an American diplomat had issued against his own government's instructions.
She was stateless for eighteen years. She became a citizen of somewhere in 1951 — the same year this book was published.
What she found
The declarations of the eighteenth century held that certain rights belong to a person simply because they are a person: inalienable, independent of any government, prior to every law.
Arendt observed what actually happened when that claim was tested. In the 1930s millions of people were reduced to precisely the condition the declarations described — human beings and nothing else, stripped of nationality, membership, occupation and place. According to the theory, this was the moment their human rights should have become visible in their pure form, standing free of any state.
Instead they vanished.
Rights turned out to be things a person held by belonging somewhere. Take away the belonging and what remained was not a bearer of inalienable rights but a person with a piece of paper describing rights nobody was obliged to hear. There was no forum. There was no one who had to listen. The rights existed in the same way a law exists in a country you cannot enter.
So the first deprivation is not of speech, or property, or movement, or safety. It is of the standing from which any of those could be claimed — a place in the world where what you say counts as an opinion and what you do counts as an action. Lose that and you have not lost an argument. You have lost the room in which arguing is a thing that happens.
She called it the right to have rights: the one right that is not on any list, because every list presupposes it.
Why this is the limit and not a mechanism
Everything earlier in this section can be met with an improvement.
The junta reached no finding — so require findings. Punishment was arbitrary — so make it proportionate and certain. Enforcement was brutal — so make it architectural. Conditions were filthy — so publish them and inspect. Process was ruinously slow — so make it fast, free and reviewable without limit.
Do all of it. Do it well. Do it better than has ever been done.
None of it supplies standing, because standing is not a feature of a process. It is the thing that has to exist before a process means anything, and it cannot be issued by the body that administers you — a right granted by the thing you would use it against is a permission wearing the word.
That is why this page comes last. A mechanism can always be answered with a better mechanism. A limit cannot be answered at all.
The problem with the woman who wrote it
It goes here rather than being left for somebody else to find.
In 1959 Arendt published an essay on the desegregation of the schools at Little Rock, opposing federal enforcement, arguing that education was a matter for parents rather than the state and that children should not be made the instrument of a political struggle. Ralph Ellison answered her, and told her what she had not understood: that the parents of those children were not sacrificing them to a cause but preparing them for a reality they would meet anyway, and that this was an old and deliberate discipline she had no access to.
She wrote to him and said he was right, and that she had not grasped it.
The woman who wrote the most exact sentence in the language about people without standing wrote badly, in public, about a group of American children who had none. It is the same shape as Kant's failure and Las Casas's — and like Las Casas, she noticed, and said so, against herself.
Where the section arrives
Assemble an arrangement that satisfies every reform in this section at once.
The rules are published in advance, in plain language, and any person may read the whole of their own record without applying for it. Consequences are graduated, proportionate, immediate and never severe. Enforcement requires no enforcer, so nobody is ever handled. Conditions are open to inspection and the inspection figures are published. Any determination may be reviewed, at any time, without fee and without limit, and the review rate and the success rate are published too.
There is no cruelty in it anywhere. There is no lie in it anywhere. Every single objection raised across four hundred and seventy-five years has been met, and met properly, by people who read the objections and agreed with them.
And a person outside it holds every one of those rights and has nowhere to stand while holding them. Not because they were refused. Because the arrangement is the place where standing is issued, and they are not in it.
Seventy-five years, and nothing in her sentence has aged. It requires no adjustment for modern conditions, which is what one would expect of a limit, and what one never expects of a mechanism.
They were not refused a hearing. There was simply nowhere for them to be heard, and no rule anywhere had been broken to arrange it.
JU · P07 · Robert Anthony