The Conditions of ‘Savages’? forces’ such as historical custom or divine command. 36 Instead, this declaration proclaimed the rights of man to be independent and inalienable. The new idea was that human rights were not established by any authority or deduced from any law, that they were not part of ‘some larger encompassing order’, 37 but that they were inherent in all humans, and that they constituted the foundation of all other laws. Arendt notes that this new idea of human rights emerged at the same time as the idea of popular sovereignty, which was also proclaimed in the name of ‘man’, rather than, for instance, by the grace of God, like the sovereignty of princes under feudalism. On the basis of these observations, Arendt develops the following argument: From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of a social order. If a tribal or other ‘backward’ community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was oppressed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the individual, was the image of man. The full implication of this identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of nation-states in the middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart of Africa. 38 This passage is the first passage in ch 9 where the terms ‘savages’ and ‘Africa’ appear. In the last clause of the first sentence and in the second sentence, Arendt uses free indirect speech to describe the experience of eighteenth century Europeans from their perspective. Arendt argues that it seemed to eighteenth century Europeans that the independent human being that had been declared to be the subject of human rights existed nowhere, because what they called ‘savages’ would have been the clearest instance of completely isolated human beings, but these Europeans observed that ‘even savages’ lived in some kind of a social order. Moreover, Arendt argues, eighteenth century Europeans also concluded from their observations of ‘savages’ that not all human beings enjoyed human rights. According to Arendt, the experience of the tension between the declaration of abstract human rights on the one hand, and the concrete observation of the people they called ‘savages’ on the other, led to the ‘blending’ of the question of human rights with the question of national emancipation, by means of a narrative of progress: ‘savages’ did not yet enjoy human rights because they had not yet liberated themselves, as a people, from despotism, and had therefore not yet reached the civilisational maturity necessary for the enjoyment of human rights. But if Arendt’s reference to ‘savages’ at the beginning of the passage can be explained as free indirect speech imagining the perspective of eighteenth century Europeans on the concept of humanity, why does she bring up ‘the heart of Africa’ 36 37 38 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 291, citing Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (France) 26 August 1789. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 291. ibid. 201