Arendt saw economic rights claims as the ruining of the revolutions

Evidence

Here, their analysis was close to that of Arendt, who depicted the French Revolution’s turn towards economic equality as the eruption of the concerns of the household into the political sphere. Arendt argued that, just as for pre-moderns, the distinction between rich and poor was natural and unavoidable; the French revolutionaries asserted the rights of the people against ‘tyranny and oppression, not against exploitation and poverty’. In the transformation of the rights of man into the ‘rights of the Sans-Culottes’ (rights to ‘dress, food and the reproduction of the species’), Arendt saw the turning point of all subsequent revolutions. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 160

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Arendt-neoliberal convergence on why economic claims corrupt liberty is a genuinely dense analytical knot — worth sitting with because it undercuts both the left’s appropriation of Arendt and the right’s claim to her tradition.
• QUESTION: To what extent does this Arendt-neoliberal agreement on ‘rights of the Sans-Culottes’ prefigure today’s disputes over whether economic and social rights belong in human-rights law at all?