Post-modern human rights and the centrality of the dignity of the human person from the organic peception of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The traumatic events caused by totalitarism and its crimes against humanity in World War II are, with relative consense, the breaking point between modernity and postmodernity. This facts were witnessed and analysed by Hannah Arendt, and, since then, her thougths turned into the search of essential elements of human condition, public space notion and the need for human values respect. The detailed revelations of the Holocaust, especially the premises of progress e rational administration behind it (undertaken of behalf of legality), make it the disenchantment paradigm of the modernity. Therefore, the postmodernity, less than a age, is a transition moviment marked by awareness of change of the culture and socio-human relations. The law, in that period, based on the postpositivism mindset, is characterized by the inclusion of justice principles, rapprochement with ethics and human rights main role, all developed since the human dignity value – a concept aproached, even in a fragmentary way, by Arendt’s political philosophy.