Impartial third and disinterested judgment: Kojève and Arendt’s cosmopolitan phenomenologies of human rights as a response to Schmitt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes that Hannah Arendt and Alexandre Kojève’s responses to Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, when combined, provide a historical and normative basis for a cosmopolitan view on human rights. I argue that by systematically merging Kojève’s theory of the “disinterested and impartial third” and Arendt’s theory of “disinterested judgment,” legal institutions, economic redistribution, and intersubjective normativity can be combined to create a robust response to Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. To demonstrate this, I examine their efforts to resolve the contradiction between universal rights and national sovereignty from a phenomenological standpoint. Arendt’s idea of the “common world” is analyzed, showing how it upholds the idea of a non-sovereign public realm as a normative source of human rights but fails to consider the institutional and economic factors required for their realization. I then explore Kojève’s theory of impartial international legal institutions and his critique of economic colonialism to confront these factors. Additionally, Arendt’s theory of disinterested judgment is shown to address the limitations of Kojève’s phenomenological view of disinterestedness. This convergence between Kojève and Arendt provides a comprehensive response to the practical challenges of Arendt’s theory, while also highlighting the importance of “world opinion” in transforming sovereignty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".