Hannah Arendt’s Thought Of Human Rights

This thesis focuses on elaborating a new understanding about human rights by Hannah Arendt systematically.In Arendt’s mind, there must be a right which was not concluded in the previous human rights——the right belongs to community, the right to have rights. Once people lose such right and are deprived of their legal status, they will get into a situation completely without rights. Arendt thought that there were two misunderstandings of human rights in the past. One was the deep-rooted thought that the human rights derived from the foundation of one’s own nature or a transcendent basis, natural rights thesis raised human rights to the height of the divine rights, thus ignored the relief of human rights; The other was neglecting the truth that human rights should depend on more strict order. The cause for modern human rights disaster, on the one hand, is the misunderstanding of human rights in the past, on the other hand, is the loneliness of people who lose the atom multilateration in the world. People being plunged into an abyss of misery actually are not due to the seemingly accidental totalitarianism, but due to the modernity that has broken away from tradition. Arendt experienced such break from the real world. Her way of thinking of human rights is the empirical type, she proposed the "right" to have rights from the experience of her own, and tried to reveal human rights disaster chains by using the ancient Greek political experience.With the help of political experiences of the ancient Greek, Arendt find out way to go out of the human rights disaster: only when people have a citizenship and human world exists a public domain, it is possible to overcome the modern loneliness and eliminate human rights disaster through the actions of people in the public sphere. Safeguard the rights of the people’s way is not the source drawn from the people and the strength, but comes from the birth of man, the plural of the facts.The disaster of the 20 th century told us that we need a new understanding of human rights: the right belongs to community, the right to have rights, which is also the basic right for human. What’s more, the safeguard of each citizen’s specific rights rely on every citizen’s action.