Abstract

This thesis examines the principles and foundations underpinning “universal” rights articulated phenomenologically by Hannah Arendt and Alexandre Kojève out of the historical diremptions of modernity. It will be argued in the first chapter that Arendt’s naturalistic phenomenology of labour––and the concomitant genealogy of the “submersion” of the “political” into the “social” sphere––prevented her from conceiving modern welfare rights in view of her own analysis of the contradiction between legal equality and class inequality. Kojève’s theory of rights, expounded phenomenologically in the dialectic of the working consciousness and need for recognition, along with the juridical historiography it engenders, will be presented as a corrective to Arendt’s phenomenology of labour and the genealogy of “submersion.” Kojève’s principle of “socialist right of equity” will be argued to stand for an egalitarian, if precarious, reconfiguration of the historical diremption between state and civil society attendant to the French Revolution. The principle of right’s conditions of possibility will be discussed in the second chapter. In contrasting Arendt’s phenomenological “common world” and Kojève’s phenomenological “impartial third” as cosmopolitan grounds of rights, two thinkers will be shown to have provided different but complementary responses to Carl Schmitt’s decisionist theology of sovereignty by drawing on resources of ecclesiology and teleological eschatology. Arendt’s phenomenological “common world” will be shown to lack institutional foundations while offering an account of disinterested intersubjective judgment missing in Kojève’s phenomenological notion of the “disinterested and impartial third.” The impartiality of the “third” in Kojève will be explicated as a response to Schmitt’s theory of political sovereignty that speculatively co-joins the diremption between state and nation to the diremption between state and civil society thereby accounting for the critique of international political economy partially adopted by Arendt. Taken systematically, Kojève’s impartial juridical federation, combined with Arendt’s theory of disinterested judgment, will be shown to offer strong cosmopolitan foundations for “universal” rights.