Being outside the law means crime offers the only path back into legal protection
Evidence
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 696
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Arendt’s operational test: what defines being ‘outside the pale of the law’ is that breaking the law improves your position — a haunting definition of rightlessness to carry into later readings.
- DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — the criminal is the privileged citizen, the law-abiding stateless person is the nonperson — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting framing of rights as created by the law’s recognition rather than by personhood.