Humanity has replaced nature and history as the ground of human rights

Evidence

Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have become equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of man can no longer be comprehended in terms of either category. On the other hand, humanity, which for the eighteenth century, in Kantian terminology, was no more than a regulative idea, has today become an inescapable fact. This new situation, in which “humanity” has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 729

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘right to have rights’ as the foundational concept of belonging to humanity itself rather than to any state.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated purpose: this is the core vocabulary the Islamophobia field builds on for statelessness and exclusion through race-thinking. — connects to: Human society is a historical reality that appropriates nature rather than submitting to it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 142; Human rights content results from political struggle, not nature or consensus