Justine Lacroix
Université libre de Bruxelles
Arendt, Human Rights and French Philosophy1
In a recent article in Le Monde, the philosopher Chantal Delsol argued against recognition
of same-sex marriage by invoking none other than Hannah Arendt. Delsol writes: ‘Hannah
Arendt posited that the essence of totalitarianism is the belief that “anything is possible”; now,
societal reforms (gay marriage, for instance) that express this “anything is possible” clause
contain, perpetuate and inform a type of totalitarianism’2. Not long before, another French public
intellectual, Alain Finkielkraut, had shown little less hesitation in interpreting the new
requirement for government ministers to publish records of their holdings as an echo of the fight
against hypocrisy waged by Arendt during her analysis of the Terror in On Revolution.
These two examples, though admittedly somewhat extreme, illustrate the ‘conservative
appropriation’ of Arendt’s ideas in various quarters of French thought, and the vastly differing
reception of her work in France and the English-speaking world (though as we shall see, works
by Miguel Abensour, Etienne Balibar and Etienne Tassin among others have contributed to
narrowing this gap). The reasons for this difference are well-known enough. They result, first of
all, from the incomprehension that has dogged the reception of the Origins of Totalitarianism in
France for some decades: ‘It was in fact inevitable that at the very moment when antitotalitarianism became a synonym for anti-communism, Arendt’s book should have been
interpreted as a “Cold War bible” and placed in the index librorum prohibitorum of a left subjected to
the hegemony of Stalinism’3.
We should remember, indeed, that the first reviewer of the Origins in French was
Raymond Aron in 1954. Yet reading the review today, it is hard not to be struck by its reserved
position: having pointed out a number of factual errors and criticised a ‘tone of haughty
superiority towards matters and men’4, Aron judges that ‘if the majority of her [Arendt’s] analyses
taken individually are persuasive, the organising concepts and ideas that the author considers as
essential leave one unconvinced’5. But for all this, and despite his misgivings, Aron remains the
first to have introduced a French audience to Arendt’s work, publishing The Human Condition
(translated as La condition de l’homme moderne) in his collection ‘La liberté de l’esprit’ with CalmannLévy in 1963, which in itself sufficed to secure Arendt a lasting place in the French ideological
landscape. Furthermore, in France as elsewhere, Arendt was vilified amidst the controversy over
Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in 1966, when the French translation of the work first appeared, the
weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur had no qualms in publishing a special section under the
title ‘Is Hannah Arendt a Nazi?’
1 An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the panel ‘Rights and Radical Democracy. Critical Conversations
with Arendt and Rancière” at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. I would like to
thank all the participants and especially James Ingram, Ayten Gündogdu, Andrew Schaap and Lida Maxwell for our
exchanges of this topic. I would also like to thank Jean-Yves Pranchère, Etienne Tassin, Tristan Storme and Patrick
Weil for their valuable comments on previous versions of this text. This article was written with the support of the
European Research Council through the ERC “Starting Grant” RESIST (2010-2015).
2 Chantal Delsol, “Les orwelliens ou la naissance d’une gauche conservatrice”, Le Monde, Saturday 25 May 2013, p.
21.
3 Enzo Traverso, La fin de la modernité juive. Histoire d’un tournant conservateur, Paris, La Découverte, 2013, p. 95.
4 Raymond Aron, “L’essence du totalitarisme. À propos d’Hannah Arendt” (1954) in Commentaire n°112, 2005-2006,
p. 944.
5 Ibid, p. 945.
1
France, in reality, discovered Arendt nearly thirty years late. The Origins appeared in
translation – not as a single book but in a format that suggested three distinct works – only in
1972, 1973 and 1982, and with three different publishers.6 Now, these translations appeared at a
crucial juncture, namely that of the so-called ‘anti-totalitarian’ turn in French thought. In the mid1970s, French culture seized on the concept of totalitarianism, which ‘with the exception of a few
intellectuals such as Raymond Aron and David Rousset, it [French culture] had to all intents and
purposes neglected for a quarter of a century, at a time when the concept was already at the
forefront of political debate in Germany and Anglophone countries’7. Moreover, with the notable
exceptions of Claude Lefort, Miguel Abensour and a few others, once the concept was
‘discovered’, the French debate on totalitarianism therefore took on the colours of a veritable
‘cultural restoration’8.
In this peculiar context, Arendt’s output served as a lifeline for a generation of
intellectuals that had been left stranded after the rejection of Marxism. As Enzo Traverso
remarks, in France Arendt’s thought was (at least at the outset) largely stripped of its critical
dimension, especially on the topic of imperialism; whereas in the US, she was one of the authors
whose writings served as a seedbed for youth political radicalisation in the 1960s 9 . Miguel
Abensour (who clearly disagrees with the comparison) underlines that French intellectuals even
on occasion placed Arendt strategically, ‘for the war effort’, as an intellectual bedfellow of Leo
Strauss, ‘as if the two authors had espoused a common way of thinking about the political,
diverging only on the matter of political decisions properly understood’10. From the start of the
1960s onwards, what is more, public intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut extensively invoked
Arendt’s writings on the ‘crisis in education’ in the debate on the supposed disintegration of a
public school system which (such authors argued) had abandoned its proper role of transmission
in favour of a demagogy attempting to give ‘voice to pupils’ and thereby ‘disinherit all’11. Taken
together, these circumstances appeared to give credence to a conservative interpretation of
Hannah Arendt, which cast her as an advocate of preserving tradition for its own sake.
However, this article aims to examine French reception not of the entirety of Arendt’s
output but rather that of one of her best-known texts, which comes at the end of the second
volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism: ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the
Rights of Man’. In this piece, Arendt exposed the paradox that lies at the heart of the discourse
of human rights, and coined the formula – as inspired as it is enigmatic – of the ‘right to have
rights’. Contemporary French thought provides an especially instructive ‘laboratory’ for
examination of the meaning and present-day relevance of Arendt’s chapter. The polarised
interpretations the piece has elicited (and continues to) in France raise issues that also form the
core of contemporary debates about the possibility and meaning of cosmopolitan citizenship. In
other words, if Arendt’s writings have given rise to some grave misunderstandings in French
hands, these same misunderstandings have also occasioned some strikingly innovative
interpretations in response.
Michelle-Irène Brudny de Launay, “Preface” in Hannah Arendt, La nature du totalitarisme, Paris, Payot, 1990.
Enzo Traverso, Le totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat, Paris, Seuil coll. Points, 2001, p. 81.
8 Ibid, p. 85.
9 Enzo Traverso, “La mémoire des vaincus”, Vacarme 21, www.vacarme.org/article434.html
10 Miguel Abensour, Hannah Arendt contre la philosophie politique? Paris, Sens et Tonka, 2006, p. 10.
11 On these shifts in contemporary republicanism in the 1990s, see Cécile Laborde’s article, “The Culture(s) of the
Republic. Nationalism and Republicanism in Contemporary French Republican Thought”, Political Theory, vol. 29,
n°5, 2011, p. 716-35. See also Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68, La Découverte, 2009, p. 170. For the use of Arendt to
criticise the decline of the republican school, see especially the debate between Alain Finkielkraut and Bérénice Levet
at La Règle du jeu: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrlu40_que-nous-apprend-hannah-arendt_news
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In particular, I will show that, Arendt’s article furnishes two distinct interpretations in
Francophone analysis that correspond respectively with two contemporary critiques of
cosmopolitanism. According to the first, Arendt’s meaning was that human rights can only be
realised within a determined national collectivity; in this view, her reasoning thus supports the
primacy of a national or communitarian conception of politics in the lineage of the famous
arguments invoked by Edmund Burke against the 1789 Declaration. The second interpretation,
radically opposed to the first in political terms since it attacks the hypocrisy of a certain type of
abstract humanism, reads Arendt’s text as an invitation to pronounce human rights obsolete, on
the grounds that they are inextricably linked to an assertion of the sovereign violence of the
nation-state (I). In counterpoise to these two interpretations, I foreground alternative readings by
Miguel Abensour, Etienne Balibar and Etienne Tassin, suggesting that Arendt’s work in fact
embodies a ‘political’ conception of human rights. Developing this line of thought further, I shall
counter the critiques of cosmopolitanism invoked in the first part with a demonstration that
Arendt’s texts in fact neither devalue abstract humanism, nor launch an assault on hypocrisy in
human rights rhetoric, nor restrict human rights to the framework of a national collectivity (II).
Finally, I will explore Arendt’s positions further with an examination of the European ‘case’,
which provides a contemporary illustration of the real achievements – yet also the limits – of this
embryonic form of cosmopolitan citizenship (III).
The choice of the European example to ‘test’ the formula of the ‘right to have rights’ is
pertinent not only because of the importance that Arendt accorded to empirical issues in the
development of her theoretical framework, but also in view of the fact that the two Francophone
authors who stand out as the most lucid interpreters of Arendt’s chapter on ‘The Decline of the
Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’, Etienne Balibar and Etienne Tassin, have both
also devoted a significant swathe of their writings to the European question.
I. Two interpretations of the ‘right to have rights’, or two possible critiques of
cosmopolitanism
In ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ Arendt explores the
situation of stateless persons in the period between the two World Wars, and demonstrates that
what she terms ‘the annihilation of the juridical person’12 – that is, the act of stripping entire
human groups of their legal rights – was by no means simply a diabolical totalitarian aberration,
but was foreshadowed by European nation-states’ treatment of minorities and stateless persons
after the First World War. Deprived of a government to represent and protect them, Arendt
argues, these groups were cast into absolute illegality.
This situation illustrates the paradox of human rights. These have on the one hand been
described as inalienable and imprescriptible, in the sense that they are presumed to exist
independently of belonging to a given collectivity. Yet Arendt argues that it is precisely when
human beings have been deprived of a government of their own, and thereby left without
recourse to any resources other than their ‘natural’ rights, that they have found themselves
‘without rights’: reduced to their basic human condition, they no longer at such times enjoyed the
protection of any effective authority. Not only, then, has loss of national rights engendered loss
of human rights; as the example of Israel proves, only the consecration of national rights has
ensured the effective restitution of human rights. Indeed, this was the unprecedented essence of
the Eichmann trial:
12
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New-York, Harcourt Inc., Harvest Book, 1976, p. 455.
3
‘…for the first time (since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans), Jews were
able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people, that, for the first time, they did not
need to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the
rights of man – rights which, as no one knew better than they, were claimed only by people who were too
weak to defend their “rights of Englishmen” and to enforce their own laws’13.
It was this that led into the celebrated formula of the ‘right to have rights’. The first human
right, Arendt posits, and that which informs all others, is that of belonging to a defined political
community. What those who are stripped of this belonging to an organised community lose is
less the right to liberty than the right to act, less the right to think as they will than the right to
hold an opinion: ‘Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his
essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from
humanity’14.
Francophone analyses frequently condense Arendt’s chapter into a denunciation of the
abstract and formal nature of human rights, which events have proved ineffective when
dissociated from national rights. More specifically, we can identify two readings of the human
rights question discernible in Arendt’s writing, both of which arguably constitute a
misinterpretation in Arendtian understandings of human rights. This misinterpretation interests
me here less for the purposes of textual analysis, and more because it provides the skeleton for
two separate critiques of cosmopolitan aspirations.
A revival of Burke’s arguments?
According to the first interpretation – which casts Arendt in a ‘conservative’ mould –
humanity can only exist inside national belonging. This supports ‘the primacy of a communitarian
conception of politics over a public understanding’15, which appears to qualify the well-known
reasoning of Edmund Burke on the ineffectual nature of human rights when divorced from
national belonging and allegiance to a state. While human rights are presumed to protect all men
from arbitrary power, they never in fact exist except as ‘citizen rights’, or in other words the
rights of nationals. According to Arendt, these rights are an abstract principle that is worth
infinitely less than the fact of belonging to a national political collectivity16.
Indeed, in as much as Arendt herself saw in the fate of interwar refugees ‘an ironical, bitter, and
belated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed to the
French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man’17, it may appear logical to conclude that
she is merely ‘reviving’ Burke’s distinction between ‘metaphysical rights’ and the ‘true rights of
man’. ‘According to Hannah Arendt’, Philippe Raynaud writes in this vein, ‘Burke’s great merit
was that of rediscovering – beyond an emerging ideology – the conditions of authentic political
experience, of which the first is undoubtedly belonging to a defined community, based on a
tradition that is able to ensure effective implementation of rights where nothing else can’18.
Though he reaches a very different political conclusion – accusing Arendt of making one of
those ‘errors of perspective which even today play their part in blurring the horizon’ 19 , the
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, New-York, Penguin, 2006.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit., p. 297.
15 Etienne Tassin, “La signification politique des droits de l’homme : lectures de Hannah Arendt” in Lambros
Couloubaritsis et Martin Legros (eds.) L’énigme de l’humanité en l’homme, Bruxelles, Ousia, forthcoming.
16 Philippe Raynaud, Preface to L’humaine condition, Paris, Gallimard, 2012, p. 24.
17 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit, p. 299.
18 Philippe Raynaud, Trois révolutions de la liberté. Angleterre, Amérique, France, Paris, PUF, 2009, p. 35.
19 Zeev Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières, Paris, Fayard, 2006, p. 556.
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historian of ideas Zeev Sternhell also regards Arendt’s reasoning as directly tracing Burke’s
thoughts on our ‘naked and trembling’ human nature incapable of commanding any respect.
Sternhell endeavours to furnish firm opposition to these arguments by emphasising that the Jews
were persecuted ‘not as human beings stripped of their distinctive characteristics’ but in fact ‘as
members of a defined human group, as an ethnicity in some cases, or a race in others20. This
argument is in itself certainly true; but as we shall see, Sternhell picked the wrong target when he
accused Arendt of this mistake.
Still in the same interpretive vein, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut situate Arendt in the sphere of
ambivalence about human rights, of the same strain that we find in the work of conservative
authors such as Leo Strauss or Michel Villey. In other words: ‘against the desire for radical
change, the mark of subjectivity and of its founding claims that are expressed in the Declaration
of the Rights of Man, [Arendt espouses] the wisdom of tradition; against human rights, “the
rights of Englishmen”’21. Reconnecting in ‘resolute’ fashion with the thought of Burke, Arendt
according to these authors makes little secret of her inability to conceptualise human rights22.
This fusion of Arendt’s arguments on human rights with those elaborated on the
Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 even finds its way into the work of as informed an
author as Claude Lefort, who sees fit to point out that ‘for Hannah Arendt as for Burke, only
citizen rights are real; human rights are a fiction’23. It is in large measure this distinctive French
reception of Arendt that allows us to account for Jacques Rancière’s well-known argument that
Arendt leaves us with a crippling dilemma between human rights (an empty space, an illusion,
since they are the rights of man stripped bare and therefore without rights) and citizen rights
(that is, the rights of those who already have rights, and therefore a tautology)24.
An attack on abstract humanism
A second interpretation – which casts Arendt as a critic of a duplicitous humanism likened to
a form of imperialism of subjectivity – holds that the arguments of the Origins constitute an
invitation to declare human rights obsolete on the grounds that they are inextricably linked to a
modern nation-state in decay. It is in this sense that Giorgio Agamben, at the price of an
especially convoluted reconstruction of Arendt’s reasoning, locates the declaration of rights as
part of a broader theme of the biopolitical determination of modern sovereignty25. Here, human
rights are indissociable from the assertion of sovereign violence. In a slightly different way, Slavoj
Zizek’s critiques – which have (like those of Agamben) been particularly influential in certain
quarters of the extreme left in France – of the hypocrisy of human rights rhetoric used to justify
American foreign policy may also appear at first glance to find support in Arendt’s writings, for
instance in her observation that :
‘…the incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical
demonstration of the totalitarian movement’s cynical claim that no such thing as inalienable human rights
existed and that the affirmation of the democracies to the contrary was mere prejudice, hypocrisy and
cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase “human rights” became for all
Ibid, p. 558.
Luc Ferry et Alain Renaut, “Des droits de l’homme à l’idée républicaine” in Philosophie politique, Paris, PUF, 2007, p.
483.
22 Luc Ferry, “Le droit. La nouvelle querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” in Luc Ferry et Alain Renaut, Philosophie
Politique, op. cit., p. 43.
23 Claude Lefort, “Hannah Arendt et la question du politique” in Essais sur le politique, Paris, Seuil, 1986, p. 74.
24 Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” The South Atlantic Quarterly n°103, 2/3, 2004, p. 302.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue , Paris, Seuil, 1997.
20
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concerned – victims, persecutors and onlookers alike – the evidence of hopeless idealism and fumbling
feeble-minded hypocrisy’26.
We see here that Arendt’s reasoning may also feed another critique of cosmopolitanism:
no longer the argument that human rights are restricted to those who belong to a national
collectivity, but instead the attack on a hypocritical brand of abstract humanism that merely
(according to this criticism) draws a thin veil over a cold calculation of interests underlying
invocations of human rights politics, in particular for the purposes of so-called ‘humanitarian’
intervention.
At the same time, though these critiques are highly opposed in political terms, their
interpretations of the chapter on ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of Human
Rights’ turn out to be relatively similar. While Agamben judges that Burke’s ‘quip’ on the rights
of Englishmen takes on ‘unexpected depth’ 27 in Arendt’s hands, the Trotskyite philosopher
Daniel Bensaïd also aligns Arendt’s analysis with that elaborated by another conservative: no
longer Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss or Michel Villey but now Carl Schmitt, who (Bensaïd argues)
saw before Hannah Arendt’ the dangers of depoliticisation implicit in granting formal or abstract
rights28. According to Bensaïd, Arendt merely reproduces in different terms Schmitt’s critique of
depoliticisation caused by the elevation of Humanity as the supreme autority for right. It is in this
sense that Bensaïd evokes (in the same vein as Agamben’s interpretation) the ‘dissolution of
politics in humanitarian action’ and the political exploitation of abstract rights by the dominant
powers29.
Yet those who claim to find confirmation in Arendt’s work that human rights are always
those of national citizens, or who conversely condemn her inability to ‘conceptualise’ human
rights – without forgetting those who think to join her in arguing that declarations of rights have
lost their relevance – all miss the aporetic nature of her approach. Arendt’s reasoning is ‘aporetic’
in the sense of a Socratic type of reasoning that attempts to grasp an ordinary political concept,
to challenge traditional ways of understanding it, and thereby to enable a reconceptualisation of
its meaning30. Far from blocking the path, Arendt’s thought in fact outlines a critical space that
opens the way towards a ‘political’31 conception of human rights.
II. A ‘political’ conception of human rights
In French political philosophy, this ‘political’ interpretation of human rights in Arendt’s
writings has been elaborated above all by Etienne Balibar in the last decade, and more recently by
Etienne Tassin. The ground was prepared in large part, however, by the reconceptualisation of
Arendt’s thought proposed in 1996 by Miguel Abensour. Emeritus Professor of philosophy at
the Université de Paris VII Denis Diderot and former president of the Collège international de
philosophie, Abensour followed in the footsteps of Lefort to develop one of the most original
interpretations of totalitarianism, and one that refused, ‘against the prevailing spirit of its time, to
empty a utopian horizon of social and political transformation’32.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins, op.cit., p. 269.
Giorgio Agamben, Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, op. cit., p. 138.
28 I owe this observation to Tristan Storme.
29
Daniel Bensaïd, Eloge de la politique profane, Paris, Albin Michel 2008, p. 86-87.
30 Ayten Gündogdu, “Perplexities of the rights of man : Arendt on the aporias of human rights”, European Journal of
Political Theory, vol. 11, n°1, January 2012, p. 8.
31 See James D. Ingram, “What is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights”, American
Political Science Review, vol. 102, n°4, November 2008.
32 Enzo Traverso, Le totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat, op. cit., p. 749.
26
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More specifically, working against the simplications made by some antitotalitarian strains
of thought, marked by an ‘apolitical character that degenerates into a devalorisation of politics
and an overinvestment of ethics’33, Abensour set out in 1996 to demonstrate that Arendt is far
removed from the classic liberal critique that views totalitarianism as a subordination of the
private sphere to the public: ‘Indeed, totalitarian domination cannot subordinate private life to
public, since it constitutes first and foremost a destruction of public life, and even of the
possibility of its existence’34. Far removed from the ‘conservative’ interpretation, Abensour sees
in Arendt’s works an emancipatory promise not at all dissimilar to Claude Lefort’s ‘savage
democracy’: two authors who have in much the same motion condemned totalitarian domination,
and worked to revive a conception of the political. Abensour does not deal specifically with the
human rights question, but it is clearly in the line of his interpretation – according to which
Arendt’s institution of the political instantiates a ‘principle of anarchy’ that is as far away from
Burke’s positivism as it is from Strauss’s neo-classicism – that we can locate the reinvestments of
human rights advanced by Balibar and Tassin, both of whom emphasise the paradoxical
conception of human rights in Arendt’s work, and its truly political dimension.
The paradox of a politics of human rights
The first paradox of the human rights question in Arendt’s work – and the main source
of the misunderstandings discussed above – lies, for Etienne Balibar, in her combination of a
radical rejection of any anthropological basis for human rights with an uncompromising defence
of their imprescriptible character, according to which neglect of human rights amounts to a
destruction of the human. The paradox is that Arendt appears to deny with one hand what she
wishes to put into practice with the other35. Hence the risk to confuse her condemnation of a
discourse of natural rights with that of a discourse of human rights in itself. It is difficult to deny
that Arendt no longer believes it possible to base human rights on the idea that man is an integral
part of the cosmos. Yet though she forcefully refuses an ‘essentialist’ conception of rights that
links them to a universal or formal human essence incarnated in each individual, Arendt
nonetheless emphasises that :
‘The only condition given for the establishment of rights is the plurality of human beings; rights
exist because we inhabit the earth with other human beings. No divine commandment issuing from the
creation of man in God’s image and no natural law arising from the nature of man are sufficient to
establish a new law on earth, for rights emerge from human plurality while divine commandments or
natural law would be true even if there were only a single human being’36.
In other words, to be human is to be part of a plurality of individuals, each unique and
each with the potential to engage in collective action. Hence, as Etienne Tassin writes, the unfounded character of human rights in Arendt’s thought, in the sense that human rights are not,
for Arendt, conceivable as an origin to be rediscovered (or restored), but only as an invention or a
perpetuated beginning37. For Arendt, human rights are not natural: they are conventions, forms
33 Miguel Abensour, “D’une mésinterprétation du totalitarisme et de ses effets”, Tumultes n°8, 1996, p. 11-44 in Enzo
Traverso, Le totalitarisme, op. cit., p. 756. See also : Miguel Abensour, Hannah Arendt contre la philosophie politique? Paris,
Sens et Tonka, 2006.
34 Ibid, p. 775.
35 Etienne Balibar, “Arendt, le droit aux droits et la désobéissance civique” in La proposition de l’Egaliberté, Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 2010.
36 Hannah Arendt, Les origines du totalitarisme, Paris, Gallimard, 2002, p. 871 (Chapter XIII, Concluding Remarks in
1951’s edition of the Origins).
37 Etienne Balibar, “Arendt, le droit aux droits et la désobéissance civique”, in La proposition d’égaliberté, Paris, PUF,
2010, p. 201.
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of recognition produced by agreement between human beings, the fragile artefacts of communal
life38.
This allows us, following Etienne Tassin, to take the paradox one step further: human
rights in fact presume the existence of citizenship, even while they claim to exist independently
from it. With the difference, however, that this is not a factual observation, as the advocates of a
‘positive’ reading of Arendt believe: human rights presume the existence of citizenship not as a
fact but a right: ‘Human rights mean that men are men only when they are recognised as such by
other men who declare publicly that every man has the right to be recognised as a being with
rights…’39.
This is why, rather than an alternative to radical or revolutionary politics, ‘the politics of
human rights is one of its most important expressions’40. Following Jacques Rancière – who is
undoubtedly ‘more Arendtian than he realises’41 – it is precisely in the act of claiming rights that
one does not have that one becomes a political actor. Equality is not a given but a product of
human action, achieved through negotiation, struggle, compromise, defeat, and the victory of all
those originally excluded from legal definitions of rights (whether slaves, women, the poor and
underprivileged, or homosexuals), who have attained citizenship by demanding rights that they
did not previously enjoy. Or, in other words, looking at the reverse side of constitutional
formulas that found human rights on citizen rights, Arendt posits that human rights are not the
basis but rather the outcome of politics42.
Three ‘Arendtian’ responses to critiques of cosmopolitanism
More precisely, to refute the two implicit criticisms of cosmopolitanism outlined in the
first part, we may respond with three points demonstrating that Arendt’s texts neither in fact
condemn abstract humanism, nor attack the alleged hypocrisy of human rights rhetoric, nor
restrict human rights to a national collectivity.
(1) On the question of abstract humanism, Arendt’s presumed contrast between a ‘good’
American Bill of Rights – ‘good’ in the sense of practical, and moulded to the real aims of an
already instituted limited government – and a ‘bad’ Declaration of the Rights of Man – abstract
because thought to exist prior to the body politic – is far less clear-cut than some of its analysts
have claimed43. This is witnessed by Arendt’s commentary on the Dreyfus Affair in the Origins of
Totalitarianism, and especially this eloquent passage:
‘There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved. The intrigues of a
corrupt Parliament, the dry rot of a collapsing society, and the clergy’s lust for power should have
been met squarely with the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights – that
republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clémenceau) by infringing
on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all’44.
38
James D. Ingram, “What is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights”, art. cit.
Etienne Tassin, “La signification politique des droits de l’homme : lectures de Hannah Arendt”, art. cit.
40 James Ingram, “Democracy and Its Conditions : Etienne Balibar and the Contribution of Marxism to Radical
Democracy” (on file with the author).
41 I owe this remark to Etienne Tassin.
42 Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity and International Law, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2012, p. 5.
43 See Philippe Raynaud’s analysis in his preface to L’Humaine condition, op.cit., p. 27.
44Hannah Arendt, The Origins, op. cit., p. 106. I borrow this citation from Ayten Gündogdu, art. cit., p. 16
39
8
In reality, if the Origins of Totalitarianism has heroes, they go by the names of Emile Zola,
Bernard Lazare and above all Georges Clémenceau,45 whose greatness lies according to Arendt in
the fact that his politics did not combat a specific judicial error. His action was rather based upon
such “abstract” ideas as justice, liberty, and civic virtue’46. And, she adds:
‘Followers of men like Barrès who had accused the supporters of Dreyfus of losing themselves in
a “welter of metaphysics” came to realize that the abstractions of the “Tiger” were actually nearer to
political realities than the limited intelligence of ruined businessmen or the barren traditionalism of
fatalistic intellectuals’47.
The view that Arendt attacks the 1789 Declaration for its abstraction is a
misunderstanding: what she explicitly deplores, in fact, is the spinelessness of those intellectuals
and politicians of the interwar period who had become incapable of rallying around abstract
ideas. ‘The collapse of France’, she writes, ‘is due to the fact that it no longer had any true
Dreyfusards (…) or anyone able to mobilise in their rhetoric, as Clémenceau and Jaurès had
done, “the old revolutionary passion for human rights”48.
This is why we should understand Arendt’s endorsement of Burke at one remove. Arendt
certainly praises Burke’s pragmatic potency and ‘immense good sense’, but undoubtedly not his
philosophical depth49. She judges, moreover, that the arguments put forward by the author of the
Reflections on the Revolution in France against the abstract principles of the French Revolution – and
which consist in applying the notion of heritage to that of liberty – make Burke one of the
forerunners of racial thought in England50. It is true that in her later work On Revolution, Arendt
references Burke once again and ‘this time without irony’51. But we may assume that what we
encounter here is an outer limit of Arendt’s thought that arises not from her ambivalence about
the emancipatory potential of the Declaration of 1789, but rather from her inability to admit the
social dimension of political oppression 52 . Above all, following Enzo Traverso, we may ask
whether there is not in fact a real contradiction, in Arendt’s analysis of the French Revolution,
between the Origins – where she sees the sources of racial thought in the critique of human rights
philosophy pioneered by Edmund Burke – and On Revolution, where she draws a contrast between
the French Revolution, condemned by its goal of social emancipation, and the American
Revolution whose success she believes to have lain in its purely political ends53.
(2) Regarding the supposed hypocrisy of human rights, Arendt was clearly aware that
human rights discourse could well be the source of a type of ‘double-speak’. But to follow the
analysis of Jeffrey Isaac, she also believed that hypocrisy is not the greatest of all vices, and that
exposing it is not the ultimate goal of intellectual endeavour54. This is borne out by Arendt’s
45 See especially the analysis of Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 163.
46 Hannah Arendt, The Origins, p. 110.
47 Ibid, p.110.
48 Ibid, p. 358.
49 Jeffrey C. Isaac, A New Guarantee on Earth : Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human
Rights, American Political Science Review, vol. 90, n°1, 1996, p. 64.
50 Etienne Balibar, “Arendt, le droit aux droits et la désobéissance civique”, op. cit., p. 208.
51 Enzo Traverso, La fin de la modernité juive, op. cit., p. 103.
52 Ibid, p. 104.
53 Enzo Traverso, “La mémoire des vaincus”, art. cit, p. 15. Traverso adds : ‘Did the great perspicacity of those who
fought for independence lie in ignoring the slavery question? This is a Hannah Arendt in whom I cannot recognise
myself (…) she conceives of an autonomous political domain which could be divorced from the social, and an idea
of liberty dissociated from the question of exploitation and oppression…’.
54 Jeffrey C. Isaac, A New Guarantee on Earth : Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human
Rights, art.cit., p. 529.
9
analysis, in the third volume of the Origins, of the irresponsibility of intellectuals who yielded to
the temptations of totalitarianism in the interwar period. Hers are interesting claims indeed in
view of the contemporary attack on a ‘hypocritical’ rhetoric of human rights:
‘….What the spokesmen of humanism and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter
disappointment and their unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time is that an
atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (…) in a sense made it easier
to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities (…)
Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank
admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new
style of life’.55
She goes on to recall that ‘the desire for the unmasking of hypocrisy’ was ‘irresistible’
among an elite which thus demonstrated its ‘lack of a sense of reality’56. Arendt does not, of
course, deny the importance of coherence as an intellectual quality, and her thought shows
absolutely no signs of careless logic. What she does reject, on the other hand, is ideological
coherence of a formal and rigidly literal nature, achieved by denying reality and common sense57.
And above all, in her view, it is not the condemnation of incoherence or potential contradictions
between rhetoric and practice that should be the priority of our reflection and political action,
but rather the suffering inflicted by human beings on fellow human beings58.
(3) Beyond this, what appears to be at stake in Arendt’s thought is the emergence, with
the declarations of human rights, of a different form of citizenship: a cosmopolitan form that
stretches beyond the boundaries of merely national citizenship. Far from connecting the fate of
human rights to that of the modern state such (as Giorgio Agamben writes) that ‘the decline and
crisis of the state necessarily mean that human rights are defunct’59, Arendt’s analysis allows us to
start thinking about ways of attaining a right to political inclusion, or to a ‘right of man to
politics’60 beyond the nation-state. The right to have rights means the right to have a meaningful
place in the world – the ‘world’ being understood not in the sense of a defined national
collectivity but of a sphere constituted by connections between individuals who mutually
recognise each other as equals61. In other words, when Claude Lefort accuses Arendt of cutting
off ‘mutual recognition between men as equals at the boundaries of the polis’,62 he appears to
miss the observation that citizenship in Arendt’s conception exhibits a direct connection with a
cosmopolitan point of view. As Etienne Tassin writes:
‘at one remove from Burke, what comes into play in Arendt’s analysis is the possibility of moving
beyond the form of the nation-state as the only viable shape of politics and the emergence, with the
declarations of human rights, of another political form: a cosmopolitan one, which stretches beyond
merely national citizenship – which Arendt does, however, predicate as the condition for its effective
implementation’63.
Now, it may not be immediately apparent what shape to give to this ‘common world’.
Catherine Colliot-Thélène observes that for Arendt, the only alternative to national belonging is a
Hannah Arendt, The origins, op. cit., p. 334.
Ibid, p.335.
57 I owe this remark to Jean-Yves Pranchère.
58 Jeffrey C. Isaac, “A New Guarantee on Earth : Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human
Rights”, art.cit., p. 519.
59Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, Paris, Seuil, 1997, p. 145.
60Etienne Balibar, “Arendt, le droit aux droits et la désobéissance civique”, art. cit., p. 6.
61 Etienne Tassin, “La signification politique des droits de l’homme : lectures de Hannah Arendt”, art. cit.
62 Claude Lefort, “Hannah Arendt et la question du politique”, op. cit., p. 76.
63
Etienne Tassin, “La signification politique des droits de l’homme : lectures de Hannah Arendt”, art. cit.
55
56
10
belonging to humanity, but that she (Arendt) considers this ‘impossible’ 64 . It is perhaps
unnecessary, however, to take such a radical approach. To be sure, in the body of the text of the
Origins Arendt evinced a certain pessimism – or caution, at least – about the actual emergence of
this right to humanity:
‘...humanity, which for the eighteenth century, in Kantian terminology, was no more than a
regulative idea, has today become an inescapable fact. This new situation, in which humanity has in effect
assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have
rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself’65.
Already here, we see that Arendt does not explicitly declare the birth of such a right
‘impossible’. And above all, in a conclusion added ex post facto to the work, she forcefully
restates the imperative of striving towards it, and therefore of forging what Burke ‘with his
immense good sense’ had judged impossible: namely, new discoveries about morality and ideas of
liberty:
‘The concept of human rights can again be meaningful again only if they are redefined as a right
to the human condition itself, which depends upon belonging to the some human community (…) The
Rights of Man can be implemented only if they become the prepolitical foundation of a new polity, the
prelegal basis of a new legal structure, the, so to speak, prehistorical fundament from which the history of
mankind will derive its essential meaning in much the same way Western civilization did from its own
fundamental origin myths’66.
Arendt did not elaborate this new principle in any systematic way, but she sketches some
elements of it, notably in her analysis of the crime against humanity in Eichmann in Jerusalem,
where she explicitly deplores the fact that the Jerusalem tribunal at no point stated that the
extermination of entire ethnic groups was more than a crime against the Jewish, Polish or Roma
people but a veritable crime against humanity in its entirety – which, understood as such, should
have fallen under the remit of an international tribunal endorsed by the global community of
nations67. With this, Arendt confirms what she had written ten years earlier in the Origins, when
she remarked that the ‘Russian concentration camps, in which many millions were deprived even
of the dubious benefits of law in their own country, could and should become the subject of
measures that would not be bound by the imperative of respect for the rights and rules of
sovereignty’68. In other words, if she explicitly rejected the idea of world government – on the
basis that this would undermine the plurality of nationalities, cultures and political identities –
Arendt may well have endorsed what Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘post-conventional’ identity based
on a relativised sovereignty, a proliferation of checks and balances on power, and a limitation on
the power of the nation-state achieved through a combination of citizen-led initiatives and
international jurisdiction.
*
The publication of ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ now
dates back 60 years. But its intuitions, and particularly the formula of the ‘right to have rights’,
continue to be rich seams for the conceptualisation of a cosmopolitan citizenship conceived
more as an extension of the rule of law beyond national borders than the construction of a
64 Catherine Colliot Thélène, “La démocratie à l’épreuve de la globalisation”, presentation at Pierre Rosanvallon’s
seminar at the Collège de France, Paris, 13 February 2013, http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/pierre-rosanvallon
65 Hannah Arendt, The Origins, p. 298.
66 Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time, London, Martin Secker and Warburg, 1951, chap. 13.
67 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann à Jerusalem, Paris, Gallimard, 2012, p. 1284
68 Hannah Arendt, Les origines du totalitarisme, op. cit., p. 871.
11
European federal state – and still less a global one. This is all the more so in view of the fact that
the text was written at the precise moment when – after two centuries of absolute sovereignty of
law – a transition was starting towards the emergence of fundamental liberties and rights as a new
juridical category, particularly within the European polity through the European Council or the
provisions of the treaties drafted by the European Communities. From this point, to echo the
elegant phrasing of Mireille Delmas-Marty in preface to a collection of texts on fundamental
liberties and rights, ‘law no longer has every right’ 69 . Specifically, in order to conceptualise
citizenship as the ‘right to have rights’, it seems pertinent to home in on the European example –
which has the interest of showing the path that might be taken by a cosmopolitan citizenship,
even while it also starkly demonstrates its limits.
III. The ‘right to have rights’ and European citizenship
At the risk of appearing somewhat idealistic in the context of the contemporary crisis of
European construction, I would like to begin here by recalling some of the gains of European
citizenship, which several commentators have shown to be defined precisely by a movement
towards the ‘denationalisation of rights’70. In common parlance, to be a citizen of the Union
invokes the idea of a direct and vertical connection between citizens and the institutions of the
European Union. Now, seen from this perspective, European citizenship is indeed something of
a disappointment: it grants only the right to elect European deputies seen as distant and
unrepresentative, and with it the right to petition the Strasbourg Parliament and to file complaints
with the ombudsman.
However, advocates of this ‘rights citizenship’ have argued, to see European citizenship
exclusively through the lens of collective self-government is to miss its essential nature. For
citizenship must also be understood as a historical process of extension of rights to those who do
not yet enjoy them. In this light, the gains of European citizenship – understood here in its
horizontal (rather than vertical) incarnation, and including the right to freedom of movement or
even unrestricted residency on any part of European territory, and to enjoy (almost) the same
rights as the residents of the host country – are by no means negligeable.71 With the exception of
a few protected sectors such as access to high public office, the guiding principle is now clearly
that of equal treatment of state nationals and other Europeans, in terms of access to work, equal
pay and working conditions, but also various social and fiscal benefits instigated by states. And,
contrary to common belief, this type of citizenship is not merely the preserve of an elite; it does
not only benefit Erasmus exchange students. The first people to have obtained these rights, little
by little, were Italian migrant workers in the mines of Lorraine and Wallonia; now and in the
future, it is Bulgarian domestic workers or Romanian labourers who are actors in the same
process. Beyond migrant workers, students, pensioners and tourists, European law (either EU or
in the framework of the Council of Europe) has also played a significant role in protecting the
rights of the person strictly understood, whether in the fight against gender discrimination or the
recognition of equal status for homosexual and heterosexual couples.
To some extent, we may perhaps even represent European construction as a ‘fourth age
of rights’, extending the well-known (though contestable from a historical standpoint, since civil,
Mireille Delmas-Marty et Claude Lucas de Leyssac, Libertés et droits fondamentaux, Paris, Seuil, 2002.
For an in-depth exploration of this topic, please refer to Justine Lacroix, “Une citoyenneté multinationale est-elle
possible?”, La vie des idées, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Une-citoyennete-europeenne-est.html, juin 2009.
71 For this conceptualisation of the ‘horizontal’ dimension of European citizenship, see Paul Magnette, “Comment
peut-on être Européen?”, Raison publique n°7, 2007.
69
70
12
political and social rights were fused during the French Revolution72) trilogy proposed by the
sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall, who distinguished three phases of citizenship: civil
(affirmation of the principle of equality before the law); political (recognition of universal
suffrage); and social (implementation of the welfare state). In this scheme, the proposed ‘fourth
age’ would be defined less by the establishment of new rights than by a dramatic expansion of
their sphere of influence far beyond their national roots. Indeed, legally speaking, European
citizenship operates principally on a transnational level, since the rights attached to it pertain by
and large to relations between a given member state of the Union and the citizens of a second
state.
In this line of thinking, we are European not by virtue of belonging to a hypothetical
European people, but simply because we are treated no differently at home and on the territory
of another state. The guiding principle of European citizenship lies not in the construction of a
new federal form of citizenship but rather the reciprocal opening of several national citizenships
to each other. In this sense, European citizenship extends ‘the right to have rights’ to the
ensemble of states of the Federation.
The limits of cosmopolitan citizenship
If it had followed this track, the EU might perhaps have taken shape as an arena for the
gradual dissolution of identity boundaries traditionally linked to the exercise of rights. The use of
the conditional remains necessary, however, because these tentative steps towards levelling the
terrain between the rights of ‘Europeans’ go hand in hand with an ever starker distinction drawn
between Europeans and so-called ‘non-community’ individuals (ie. those from outside the
European Union), whose plight casts the cosmopolitan ambitions of the European entity into
doubt. Alongside an asylum policy that frequently neglects the obligations outlined in the Geneva
Conventions, the restrictive positioning of the space of ‘Liberty, Security and Justice’
compromises Europe’s claims (which it attempts to vindicate by its gains) to be a ‘laboratory’ for
the dissociation of national belonging from recognition of rights. In her short book Résister
Responsabiliser Anticiper, published in 2013, Mireille Delmas-Mary goes so far as to speak of
‘dehumanisation’ and a strategy of ‘open aggression’ as the characteristics of a European
‘fortress’, in which recourse to criminal or equivalent sanctions (detainment, for instance) is
pursued through a hardening of border policing and labour restrictions.
Here, I endorse Etienne Tassin’s view that far from mere ‘collateral damage’ from
European unification, clandestinity in fact represents the heart of the European conundrum; its
importance far surpasses the boundaries of ‘a mere question of border policing, which would
leave intact the radically new logic on which political Europe is built’73. It is as well to recall,
indeed, that Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment thinkers also dreamed of freedom of
movement, and that Kant based his theory of cosmopolitan rights on the principle of universal
hospitality. In this perspective, the political recognition of foreigners, and beyond it a generalized
right to free movement, is a useful criterion to evaluate how far public power succeeds in
honouring its cosmopolitan goals74.
In this sense, rather than constructing a European people on an extended scale, it would
be more in harmony with the cosmopolitan spirit to pursue this movement towards the
‘denationalisation of rights’, to the benefit of Europeans of course but also of those who do not
belong to ‘its’ nations, in order gradually to make Europe an arena for the construction of a
Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon’s comment during a debate with Catherine Colliot-Thélène during a session of the seminar
on cosmopolitan democracy at the Collège de France, 13 February 2013.
73 Etienne Tassin, “L’Union cosmopolitique et la citoyenneté du monde”, Raison publique , n°7, 2007, p. 46 and 50.
74 Ibid., p. 46 and 60.
72
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‘universal field of rights’ premised on a partial dissociation of nationality and citizenship, hitherto
all but inseparable. Another possibility to take into account is Pierre Hassner’s suggestion of
conferring European citizenship upon those who, as refugees or stateless persons, do not, or no
longer, have a territorial state within the framework of which they may access. Hassner referred
to groups with an ambiguous or incomplete status, and argued that if European citizenship, if it
must in any case be partial and paradoxical, may as well embrace these qualities by welcoming
those who are unable to be citizens elsewhere. This would, Hassner argued, be one way of
circumventing the dilemma between the stark abstraction of human rights and national
citizenship. 75 Though Arendt’s federalist views remained vague in institutional terms, her
insistence on the necessity of breaking the automatic equation of nationality with citizenship can
hardly be in doubt.76 A pluralisation of demoï would in this regard be more consistent with her
reasoning than a mere translation of the national demos into a European demos, which could only
ever reproduce national logic on a larger scale.
This is particularly relevant to the endeavour of conceiving rights in relationship to
democracy by recalling that the demands of right and those of democracy ‘are connected by a
doubly unstable definition. Rights are sought and consolidated. Democracy submerges them and
sets the bar higher. This is its untameable essence, which can never be reduced to mere
institutional mechanisms’77. Yet here we must remain cautious: if it is doubtless necessary to leave
behind an overly institutional or formal definition of democracy in order to conceive of
cosmopolitan citizenship, it seems a little precipitous simply to substitute ‘struggles for rights’ for
the principle of a self-legislating people. Conceiving of cosmopolitan citizenship means rather to
seek a possible connection between the national and the transnational, between approaches to
political commitment termed ‘liberal’ and those of a more ‘republican’ bent, between struggles
for equal rights and collective self-determination initiatives. To reflect on democracy in an age of
globalisation means to ‘complicate’ it, following Pierre Rosanvallon’s expression, but not
necessarily to change conceptual register completely.
Beyond this, conceptualising cosmopolitan citizenship means recalling too that
citizenship is also a status. This is important in counterpoise to a tendency, prevalent among
several theorists of radical democracy, to think about citizenship merely as a form of political
action and to deconstruct it as a status. On this specific point I therefore disagree with James
Ingram – to whom we owe, beyond this, a remarkable elucidation of Arendt’s political
conception of human rights – when he writes that ‘she (Arendt) conceives of rights not as a
status but as an activity’78 and that ‘“a right to have rights” is not a right to a status in a political
community but what Balibar calls a “right to politics itself” – to participate in political processes
aiming, among other things, at the invention of new rights, new forms of inclusion and
empowerment’79.
However, citizenship must not be recognised only as an attribute of those actively
involved in political mobilisation. Many individuals who do not wish to or cannot demonstrate in
Pierre Hassner, ‘Refugees : A Special Case for Cosmopolitan Citizenship?’ in Daniele Archibugi, David Held and
Martin Kölher (eds)., Re-imagining Political Community, Cambridge, Polity, 1998, p. 284.
76 See the remarks and citations from the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Gerschom Scholem in Enzo
Traverso, La fin de la modernité juive, op. cit., p. 91-92.
77 Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, De la guerre à la communauté universelle. Entre droit et politique, Paris, Fayard, 2013, p.
369.
78 James D. Ingram, “What is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights”, American
Political Science Review, vol. 102, n°4, nov. 2008, p. 412.
79 James Ingram, “Democracy and Its Conditions: Etienne Balibar and the Contribution of Marxism to Radical
Democracy” (on file with the author).
75
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the public sphere nonetheless enjoy its rights. As Alison Kesby demonstrates in her critical
exploration of the conception of the political subject in Jacques Rancière’s writings, Rancière
appears to take as given an ability to demand ‘the rights that one does not have’; hence the
danger of excluding those who cannot be directly involved in political action, whether because of
a handicap or, for instance, imprisonment or seclusion preventing meaningful action80. We may
add that ‘ordinary’ citizens who do not wish to be involved in public life also have the ‘right to
rights’ even if they only enjoy what has been won by others. As the French philosopher Alain put
it: ‘No one is worthy of rights. This is the very foundation of rights.’ And returning to Arendt, we
find that she also repeatedly emphasised in her article ‘We refugees’ (1943) that it is the loss of a
legal status in the world that has made pariahs of stateless persons. ‘Very few individuals’, she
wrote, ‘have the strength to preserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is
simply thrown into doubt’81
80
81
Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights, op.cit., p. 132-133.
Hannah Arendt, “Nous autres réfugiés” in Pouvoirs n°144, 2013, p. 12.
15