Eighteenth-century human rights presumed validity for a solitary individual, independent of community.

Evidence

The right that corresponds to this loss and that was never even mentioned among the human rights cannot be expressed in the categories of the eighteenth century because they presume that rights spring immediately from the “nature” of man—whereby it makes relatively little difference whether this nature is visualized in terms of the natural law or in terms of a being created in the image of God, whether it concerns “natural” rights or divine commands. The decisive factor is that these rights and the human dignity they bestow should remain valid and real even if only a single human being existed on earth; they are independent of human plurality and should remain valid even if a human being is expelled from the human community. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 727

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s genealogy of why the ‘right to have rights’ was unthinkable in the eighteenth-century rights idiom.