Human issues in society - Essay Example

Hannah Arendt’s article on the new guarantee was triggered by the resultant repercussion of the Second World War and the holocaust. Many people were left without a state identity and left as destitute refugees both in their original native countries and in foreign countries. Arendt believed strongly threat today’s political regimes are consequences of the political philosophies of the western traditions. She saw refugees as the bad fruits of the current political ideologies and hence she challenges the purpose and effectiveness of the current political practices and thoughts.

By her moving away from the concept of inalienable or natural rights and focusing on the right of individual membership within a community for the purpose if human dignity, she instigates a favorable foundation for human rights. Why does human dignity needs a new political guarantee as proposed by Hannah Arendt and what necessitates the need? This essay therefore intends to investigate whether in the light of totalitarianism human rights and dignity suffer compromise and hence project the reasons why human dignity needs a new guarantee Discussion In the article ‘Origin of totalitarianism’, Arendt reasons that the human dignity requires some guarantee and this is possible through new political principle.

This is after the nineteenth century idea of peaceful cosmopolitan in the respect of human rights was destroyed. Arendt says that the state of being a refugee is best understood from different perspectives; physical, social and political displacement of an individual. The lack of a physical place to live in and settle defines displacement, asylum seeker and the refugee state of human beings. However, other aspects also come in handy such as the deprivation of an individual right to action and to freedom of opinion.

The collective sum of the modern displacement and the degradation are what Arendt terms as ‘wordlessness’. She sighted the remedy to the state of wordlessness as being embedded on the need to revisit the foundations of ethics of human rights. This is because largely, liberal pieties on natural rights have lost credibility; understanding the incompatibility of national sovereignty with civic responsibility and human dignity have been hindered; as well as the importance of the citizens to understand their right in affording political empowerment being compromised.

Arendt was triggered to study the issue due to an increase in refugees within Europe. The sovereign authority in the state embraced universal individual rights and national sovereignty. However, the sovereign states restricted people from acquiring citizenship or the right to entry into their territories. This is a contradiction of the liberal state’s sovereignty and universalism and thus denying citizenship to person or group of people or turning away refugees of other states is a wrong principle.

She argues that such rights cannot be realized without the state acknowledgement to sovereign power and that a relationship abides between the state rights and individual rights. Refugees are thus the resultant product when the state rights and individual rights conflict (Cotter, para 5-6). The only way to understand the contradictions and failures of the current political thought and practice is by evaluating the experiences of the victims or