Hegel, Human Rights, and Political Membership

This paper examines Hegel's view of the relationship of human rights and political membership. Attention is accorded the concept of a right to have rights, one famously thematized by Hannah Arendt but articulated already earlier by Hegel. The discussion has five parts. Part One considers how for Hegel a notion of political membership is entailed by the concept of right itself. Part Two examines the place occupied by modern civil society in a realised account of human rights. Part Three considers the challenges posed to realised right by the phenomenon of modern poverty and the experience of ‘rightlessness’ it occasions. Part Four details how Hegel's conception of the corporation addresses the phenomenon of rightlessness, taking into account his uniquely reflexive understanding of a right to have rights and its contribution to the project of the Philosophy of Right . The concluding section briefly compares Hegel's conception of membership rights to Arendt's.