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.

Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.

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

I recently wrote an essay for In These Times about how we should think, as leftists, about gun violence and gun control. Mass shootings, as mainstream

gun control advocates contend, no doubt confirm that AR-15s shouldn't be on the street. But they can

obscure more ordinary forms of individual gun violence,

interpersonal neighborhood feuds, suicides, domestic violence, and also the violence perpetrated

by government, which through mass policing, incarceration, and global warfare, has made

...