The Rights of Others

Introduction

The book is based on Benhabib’s Seeley Lectures at Cambridge in 2002. It starts from Kant’s right of hospitality in “Perpetual Peace” and Hannah Arendt’s “right to have rights” and asks how democracies can be bound at once by universal human rights and by the self-determination of a particular people. Benhabib defends a human right to membership: refugees and migrants are owed fair procedures and a path to citizenship, though not unconditional admission. Her key concept, “democratic iterations”, describes how universal principles are taken up, contested and reinterpreted in national law and public debate, as in the French and German disputes over the Islamic headscarf.

Connections

Builds on

• Perpetual Peace1795 · Immanuel Kant

More works by Seyla Benhabib

• 1992Situating the Self