This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon and by Verso Books,

which has loads of great left-wing titles perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGoyer, Alistair Hunt,

Lita Maxwell, and Samuel Moyne, with an afterword from Astra Taylor.

Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German

citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the inalienable rights of man,

before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on,

there must first be such a thing as the right to have rights.

The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations,

Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the center of a crucial

and lively debate. Here, five leading thinkers from varied disciplines, including history, law,

politics, and literary studies, discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.

The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie Degoyer, Alistair Hunt, Lita Maxwell, and Samuel Moyne,

with an afterword from Astor Taylor.

Out now from Verso Books.

Thank you. now from Verso Books. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

We don't yet know the full extent of what Robert

Mueller's investigation will turn up on President Trump and his many hangers-on in possession

of various degrees of finality and ineptitude. What we do know is that the politics of the

Russia probe are an utter disaster, leading Republicans to hypocritically denounce purported national security

state abuses on the part of a national security state whose rampant abuses they've always cheered on

...