Hannah Arendt's phrase 'the right to have rights' has been widely celebrated in contemporary thought. But this phrase leaves the question of who is to grant or protect such a right to have rights ambiguously open.  It is only with Arendt's reflections on "crimes against humanity" in her Eichmann book, that the problem of cosmopolitan rights come to the fore.  Can there be a 'right to have rights' if there were no 'crimes against humanity'? This lecture will explore these issues, also in comparison with Raphael Lemkin's thought - the Father of the UN Genocide Convention.

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics. She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (1986); Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2002); The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002); The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), which won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004); Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations (2007). Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science since 1996 and has held the Gauss Lectures (Princeton, 1998); the Spinoza chair for distinguished visitors (Amsterdam, 2001); the John Seeley Memorial Lectures (Cambridge, 2002), the Tanner Lectures (Berkeley, 2004) and was the Catedra Ferrater Mora Distinguished Professor in Girona, Spain (Summer 2005).

Poster for the event.

By: Diana Franklin
Last updated: Thursday, 11 March 2010