ABSTRACT
Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens is the winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy's 2004 Best Book award as well as co-winner of the 2005 Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. In The Rights of Others, Benhabib proposes a concrete agenda for action, calling on states to transform existing rules and practices that separate citizens from aliens in liberal democracies. The significance of Benhabib's contribution to contemporary debate rests with her theoretically substantiated plea for recognizing membership as a human right of all persons regardless of their nationality. Focusing on the work of David Jacobson, Benhabib confronts scholars, such as Walzer, who see immigration as devaluing citizenship by fraying the political integrity or cultural cohesion of society. Benhabib challenges them by distinguishing cultural integration, with which the decline-of-citizenship school is primarily concerned, from political integration.
