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Within the text of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt circumscribes the concept of natality in ways that tend to conflate its biological, historical, institutional and phenomenological dimensions. This dissertation seeks to clarify this concept and the conceptual territory that surrounds it. Specifically, it is argued that Arendt’s construction of the concept of natality is inherently dual. Each person is delivered into a worldly environment through her primary, biological birth. As soon as she is born, she begins to be conditioned to the accepted normative standards of her community. A gap necessarily exists, however, between the person she is socio-culturally conditioned to be, and who she is explicitly, uniquely and authentically. When deeds and words are employed in service of revealing someone’s individual identity or essence, and thereby showing her to be more than simply a mirror of her cultural conditioning, it heralds a second birth, one which is existential instead of biological. According to Arendt, this existential natality must take place in the presence of other existential agents, and also may be witnessed by a spectator who then seeks to express the significance of what has occurred to those removed from the original event either by space and/or time. This expression takes the form of artifactual objects, including works of art, architectural monuments and various forms of narratives. Arendt’s theory concerning the creation of these objects contains two major problems that are critically addressed within this project. The first problem concerns the spectator’s capacity for making judgments. Works written after The Human Condition are shown to demonstrate Arendt’s attempts to address this issue. The second problem concerns the way in which Arendt portrays the issue of embodiment. This issue must be reconciled both by appealing to work from within her canon, as well as through the introduction of recent scholarship from the field of social cognition. The project concludes with the presentation of a concrete, historical example intended to be illustrative of the preceding theoretical material.

Thesis advisor: Rodrigo Chacon / Thesis advisor: Susan Shell / In this thesis, I will explore the natural tension that exists between philosophy and politics; theory and practice, and thought and action, especially as manifest in contemporary society. In order to investigate this tension, I will use a lens presented by Hannah Arendt and her writings, in particular the Human Condition and the Jewish Writings . I will use these works to illustrate Arendt's own conflict between the role of politics and philosophy in human affairs as experienced in her transition from a political journalist to a political theorist. I will argue that a comparison of these works shows Arendt's struggle with the tension between philosophy and politics; thought and action, and theory and practice. A comparison of these works also illustrates Arendt's paradoxical conclusion of the Human Condition: that in times of unprecedented crisis, although theory and philosophy are precisely what are necessary to prevent further destruction and tragedy, they unfortunately become superfluous, and then immediate (even if groundless) action becomes necessarily the only human capacity that can "save" the world. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

This thesis intends to demonstrate the radical potential of rights. I argue that rights are capable, on the one hand, of challenging capitalist social relations and the liberal legal order which sustains those relations, and, on the other hand, of constituting a new political system. I argue that without reconceptualising rights in this manner, we are unable to comprehend certain social movements which employ the language of rights for challenging the existing systems and for articulating transformative visions of a new world. This thesis suggests that we need to rethink rights as political alliances and agreements and rights-claims as political proposals between co-citizens. Here, the content of rights is formulated through a political action of the rights-holders themselves, as opposed to being derived from the pre-political sphere. Furthermore, I argue that our understanding of the scope of these political proposals and, hence, our understanding of the nature of the new order that rights can potentially constitute, depends on the way we conceptualise the conflictual dimension of rights-claims. It is the notion of a rights-claim as a challenge to the constituted order, as opposed to a petition to be included within that order, which captures how rights inaugurate a radical discursive space where potentially transformative political proposals regarding the matters of collective life can be made. Throughout this thesis I refer to a transnational movement of peasants, La Via Campesina, which fights for a new socio-political arrangement where ‘feeding the world’ is the end in itself rather than a dictate of the capitalist market. Crucially, this movement makes extensive use of the language of rights and of ‘the right to food’ in particular. I argue that it is only the radical theory of social rights constructed in this thesis that allows us to analyse the transformative core of the movements like this one.