Hannah Arendt and Cosmopolitanism

Book excerpt: Hannah Arendt and Cosmopolitanism presents the first comprehensive study of Hannah Arendt's cosmopolitanism. Challenging the common belief that cosmopolitanism is a negligible or incompatible element of Arendt's thought, it unpacks various key elements of her philosophy such as her critique of human rights, the defence of the “right to have rights” as a right to belong to a particular political community, the scepticism towards the establishment of a world government as a solution to the problem of statelessness, and the importance she attached to the passport. Through this the text argues that Arendt is a theorist of cosmopolitanism in her own right, by reconstructing as systematically as possible an issue that is relatively neglected in the secondary literature. Taraborrelli shows how Arendt anticipates and develops cosmopolitanism in four main forms - moral, political-institutional, judicial, cultural - and how in her thought there is no insuperable contradiction between cosmopolitanism and belonging to a political community, or between cosmopolitanism and the conditions of political action.