Citizenship, Statelessness and Market Fundamentalism: Arendtian Right to Have Rights

Abstract

The revival of attention to Hannah Arendt’s discussion of stateless people in her magisterial The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has added enormously to our current understandings of migration, citizenship, and ethnos in the context of globalization (see especially Benhabib, 2004, 2001; Power, 2004). In this chapter,¹ I bring Arendt’s analysis to bear on a very different kind of statelessness (to date not yet recognized) one that characterizes, those who hold de jure American citizenship but who are being expelled from the rights-bearing terrain of the rule of the law, from protection by the social state, and from access to the public sphere. My argument is that increasing numbers of market victims are being expelled from meaningful membership in an organized political community—that which confers and recognizes human identity—via a process of the contractualization and commodification of citizenship. Systematically degrading the public sphere and making the institutions of the social state increasingly irrelevant, these market regimes are transforming the foundations of citizenship from social and political to contractual and civil. As both Arendt and Karl Polanyi understood, governing through contractualism returns the social to the tyranny of naturalism and the stateless “freedom” of natural rights. In short, it steals the “right to have rights,” the very precondition for personhood.