In defense of dignity: Seyla Benhabib’s Arendtian spirit in dark times

Critical theory, feminism, questions of borders, asylum, migration, and citizenship, the dilemmas of the modern state, and sovereignty… These are among the central concerns of contemporary political thought and the issues to which the political philosopher Seyla Benhabib, the recipient of the 2025 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking, has devoted her career.

As a philosopher, she brings critical theory, normative philosophy, and feminist thought into conversation with the dilemmas of our global age. As a public intellectual, she confronts the political crises of our times with a fierce and principled independence of mind, openness to plurality, and insistence on public reasoning.

In her intellectual journey, Benhabib comes to terms with the political legacy of modernity. Weaving together philosophical influences from Kant to Weber, Hegel to Frankfurt School, Habermas to Arendt, her work aims to answer, from different but equally pressing angles, the question of how to preserve the dignity and agency of the individual. What, Benhabib asks, are the social, political, economic, cultural, and religious conditions for establishing relationships of mutual respect among human beings?

The book changed a life

Born in Istanbul to a Sephardic-Turkish family, Benhabib came of age during the global upheavals of 1968. As she later recalled: 1:

“I had declared myself a Marxist during the 1968 student movement, which had also reached us in Istanbul, Turkey, and I had read Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man with great interest and admiration.”

These early encounters with Marxism and the New Left formed the background for her interest in questions of domination and emancipation, and, at the same time, for her later resistance to reducing politics to economic structures alone.

Benhabib completed her PhD at Yale University, where her dissertation on Hegel explicitly addressed the problem of political order, reconciling the preservation of individuals' dignity and agency with the legitimacy of the modern state.

Hegel’s theory thus became, for her, an enduring resource for thinking about rights, personhood, and the modern state. Yet, once again, Benhabib would later draw our attention to the unrealized emancipatory potential in Hegel’s theory. Unlike Hegel’s, a critical theory that reflects contemporary moral and political questions cannot be confined to national borders but must extend beyond the nation-state.

In her early work, Benhabib engaged with the theories of the Frankfurt School, and particularly Jürgen Habermas’s communicative ethics. Like Habermas, Benhabib is interested in saving reason from the instrumentality with which the earlier Frankfurt School theorists had come to identify it. She defends the communicative reason while also pushing it toward greater inclusivity and diversity.

Benhabib agrees that genuine communication requires respect, fairness, honesty, and equal recognition, but she regards these values less as universal philosophical truths and more as principles growing historically out of certain social expectations. Inspired already by Arendt’s work, she treats the actual process of reaching an understanding with others through dialogue, rather than its preconditions, as the most valuable part of the public deliberation. Her work on Habermas and discourse ethics laid the philosophical foundations for her later work on the exclusion of a variety of others – women, minorities, as well as migrants, refugees, and stateless persons.

A response to postmodern feminist debates

Postmodern critique of grand narratives dominated the intellectual climate of the 1990s, and Seyla Benhabib found herself in the middle of a heated feminist discussion. At stake was how to conceptualize feminist subjectivity in the light of postmodernism. While acknowledging the validity of some of these criticisms, Benhabib finds their strong versions, which amount to a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, problematic. According to Benhabib, the Western philosophical idea of a supposedly universal, neutral, transcendent subject could be rightfully rejected, because such a figure never existed in the first place.

In its stead, Benhabib offers a feminist understanding of subjectivity that is embedded in its historical and cultural context yet still attentive to the rational and autonomous dimensions of the self. Every society transmits cultural and historical codes that shape how individuals develop. It is through these codes that a child grows up to become, for example, a Hopi-speaking or ancient-Egyptian-speaking member of their community, fully capable of participating in its complex social practices. This reflects the situatedness of the subject. At the same time, every human being becomes the initiator of their own unique life-story, one that cannot be reduced to or predicted by those cultural codes alone. This expresses the autonomy of the individual. Ultimately, Benhabib holds that such autonomous yet situated subjectivity is essential for both normative critique and political transformation. Feminist theory, therefore, should neither accept an abstract universalism nor surrender to relativism, but instead articulate universality from within the plurality of lived experience.

Benhabib later elaborated on this insight, specifically drawing on Hannah Arendt’s thought. In democratic societies, the legitimacy of our institutions depends on citizens discussing their common affairs in the public space. The power of this arrangement comes from what Arendt (following Kant) calls “enlarged mentality,” the ability to see matters from others’ points of view, and to test one’s opinions against their judgments. This process entails a public culture where everyone can articulate what they think and make their perspective visible.

According to Benhabib, through this constant challenge and unsettling of our self-centered perspective by a diversity of voices, the promise of modern politics emerges. This is a dialogical and tension-filled process. For Benhabib, it is an ongoing practice in which the voices of the migrants, stateless peoples, women, and other marginalized communities can come to speak in the name of the universal. It is a foundational political activity through which universality is reclaimed and reinterpreted.

Beyond friend-enemy distinction

Benhabib brought the concept of enlarged mentality to bear on the authoritarian and identitarian politics of our age. While an enlarged mentality contains an element of respect for the other and points toward a process of mutual understanding, she observes that authoritarian leaders’ discourse blocks this process.

Their politics are normatively grounded in an ontologically defined friend-enemy distinction, in which individual differences are absorbed into categories such as “the people” or “our side.”

A second enduring legacy of Arendt in Benhabib’s work is encapsulated in “the right to have rights.” Arendt argued that the members of political communities “have rights,” i.e., the familiar civil and political rights of citizens. But before people can enjoy any legal rights, they must first be recognized as members of humanity. Benhabib reveals that, in other words, a prior moral claim is hidden in Arendt’s formulation: every human being should first be recognized as an individual who belongs to a political community.

Arendt realized that without this prior recognition as a member of humanity, legal rights are without any foundation. The sad fact of the matter is that, in practice, humanity cannot always grant people this most basic kind of belonging. Arendt herself observed this in the process she called “the decline of the nation-state,” where millions of refugees, deported aliens, and stateless peoples had been created even before the start of World War II.

Grounding human rights

Seyla Benhabib, witnessed a migration crisis in Europe due to the Yugoslav Civil War, precisely at a time when the establishment of the European Union seemed to realize for the first time the promise of a truly cosmopolitan world order. In response to these challenges, Benhabib developed a philosophical framework for grounding human rights.

Rejecting the two reactionary claims that human rights are either simply a neo-liberal ruse for powerful states to dominate others, or a threat to democratic self-government, she offered a discourse-ethics-based foundation for embracing human rights norms. Benhabib maintains that human rights norms are not simply imposed from above. Instead, they are democratically iterated, that is, they gain force as communities appropriate, contest, and adapt them through democratic practice.

The meaning of these norms develops through repeated public contestations within country-specific contexts. Moreover, human rights norms have jurisgenerative power; when adopted by marginalized groups, they create opportunities for organized action and the rectification of injustices. Human rights, therefore, instead of being imposed from outside, become evolving principles shaped by democratic practice.

In the aftermath of a new wave of migration into Europe stemming from the Syrian War, Benhabib publicly reflected on the challenges facing Germany and the EU. While recognizing that protecting refugees is required under binding international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, she also observed that states often violate these obligations; enforcing them is always difficult. She, therefore, welcomed Germany’s decision to open its borders quickly, even if it could prove challenging for society. She insisted that refugees must be seen through the lens of human rights, not as security threats.

After the outbreak of the War in Ukraine, in the light of another mass population displacement, Benhabib renewed her commitment to “cosmopolitanism without illusions,” that is, foremost, insisting without compromise on human dignity and human rights.

Most recently, Benhabib defended International Law against the criticisms of the Third World perspective that International Law has historically merely protected the interests of Western powers rather than building a just global order. While acknowledging the various aspirations and problems of the liberal global order, Benhabib still affirms that it is possible to reconstruct international law to build a more inclusive universalism and a fairer world. Our liberal democratic institutions are not perfect, and they need constant questioning and revision. But without the universal principles embedded in them, we cannot effectively confront ongoing exploitation, injustice, and the exclusion of vulnerable groups.

Political modernity, for Benhabib, is not exhausted, as long as it is reshaped through democratic contestation.

Public discourse today feels increasingly polarized, and democratic life more and more fractured. Global resurgence of authoritarianism, neofascism, racism, sexism, and anti-LBGTQ discrimination has created an environment in which the voices of those struggling for what Benhabib calls “dignity in adversity” are increasingly muted.

Against this background, the 2025 Hannah Arendt Prize speaks with clarity. It honors a philosopher and a public intellectual, whose work, in a distinctly Arendtian sense, exhibits the “love of the world” by challenging its exclusions, illuminating its aporias, and expanding the horizons of democratic possibility.

Arendt, herself, was not tied to any single ideology. For her, the age of ideologies was over. What remained was the obligation to understand. In a similar spirit, Benhabib models a form of philosophical understanding that resists simplification and is attentive to the complexity of lived experience.

Even if, as Arendt once said, we live in “dark times,” the darkness is never complete. The work of public intellectuals, like Seyla Benhabib, illuminates our fragile and shared world.

This common world is neither given nor should be taken for granted. But in an Arendtian spirit, we can continuously enact it through struggle, plurality, and dialogue.