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Inventing Human Rights: A History, by Lynn Hunt
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“A tour de force.”—Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book Review
How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.
- Sales Rank: #237720 in eBooks
- Published on: 2008-04-17
- Released on: 2008-04-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
This comprehensive work traces the development of human rights from its conceptual roots in the Enlightenment to its full expression in the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hunt begins with a wonderfully detailed lexicographical survey of 18th century uses of rights language ("rights of man," "natural rights," "rights of humanity") to show the many currents that led to the first modern declaration of human rights, the Bill of Rights. She then triangulates the upswing in rights language with both the appearance of the novel of letters (such as Rousseau's Julie and Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa) and the rise of portraiture in the mid- to late-18th century. These particular art forms, she argues, fostered a sense of individuality in their audience and empathy for their subjects, most frequently "regular folks" rather than nobles, royalty, or saints. She then takes the reader through 250 years of rights legislation, covering the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, various anti-torture measures and 20th century campaigns against human rights violations, among others. Despite the obvious academic grounding of this sweeping work, it is aimed at a wider audience and will appeal to most readers interested either in the history of human rights or in European or American history.
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Review
A must-read for anyone who cares about civil society today. Brilliant, original, incisive, and accessible. -- Joan Dejean, author of The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour
Written by one of the leading historians of our time. Lynn Hunt's book greatly enriches the literature on human rights. -- Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize
About the Author
Lynn Hunt, former president of the American Historical Association and professor of history at UCLA, is the author of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution and co-author of Telling the Truth About History.
Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
A step towards understanding human rights as cultural history
By Joshua Malle
"Inventing Human Rights" is a short, jargon-free book that would be appropriate for an undergraduate class or general readership. The introduction and first chapter is an examination of the cultural origins of the human rights ideology. The second chapter is a history of torture. Chapters 3-5 are a "conventional" history of human rights as traced through laws, constitutions, political philosophy, etc. from roughly 1750 to the present. There is a refreshing emphasis on the French Enlightenment (which is too often neglected in works in English).
Regarding research methods, Professor Hunt is good at tracing the circulation of ideas via the circulation of books. Careful attention is paid to when certain phrases (e.g. "rights of man", "human rights") were first used, how many times important books were reprinted, what percentage of 18th century homes and libraries they could be found in, and literacy rates.
The introduction poses the question "How is it that rights came to seem self-evident in the late 18th century?" Prof. Hunt proposes an explanation in terms of the diffusion of the cultural practices of "autonomy" and "empathy", where autonomy supplies the substance of the new ethic and empathy, the motive (pp. 29-30).
When Hunt writes of autonomy as a "cultural practice" she is referring primarily to the increasing sense of delicacy regarding the human body described in the work of Norbert Elias. She thinks, for instance, that here one can find the origin of the new repugnance at judicial torture (pp 82-83).
Following Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism, Hunt maintains that just as the rise of printing made it possible for people who were widely dispersed to conceptualize themselves as part of a single national polity, the late 18th century craze for epistolary novels helped readers to conceptualize a common humanity (p.32). Novels helped readers empathize more habitually and with a greater variety of people (pp. 38-42). They also provided a model of "interiority" and autonomy for readers to emulate (pp. 45, 48).
What makes cultural history exciting (and controversial) is the way that cultural historians derive changes in moral sensibilities from changes social structure, thereby offering a social-scientific explanation of why, when and how our values change over time. For example, in the work of Norbert Elias, the increasing sense of shame over bodily functions was caused by the transformation of the aristocracy from a warrior caste to a class dependent on royal favor whose political survival required charm. And in Michel Foucault's (classic) account of the abolition of torture the adoption of "the gentle way in punishment" was due to the diffusion of new strategies of social control oriented towards efficiency and productivity which were necessary to the rise of capitalism.
But Hunt has little to say about the relationship between the new ideals and structural demands of the emerging economic order. Rather, she depicts the human rights ideology as a kind of emergent property, caused by (but not beholden to) the increasing prosperity of the late 18th century, which, once invented, proceeds with an "inner logic" of its own. (p. 34, 150ff).
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Exploration of Socio-Political Evolution (Revolution?)
By Todd K
Although written by a professor, this book is not just an important tool for students, but also an appealing read to those interested in constitutional history, European and American history, and political rights and freedoms. I found this book incredibly relevant since I see America as a whole and each subculture within struggling to define human rights in almost every political and social aspect! From immigration, marriage equality, to gun control, just to name a few. In that respect, understanding the history of how our rights as humans evolved and how our constitution was initially interpreted is viscerally important for every member of a nation founded on the notion of "self-evident truths" and "inalienable rights."
How interesting is it then, when Hunt brings up that "...the claim of self-evidence, crucial to human rights even now, gives rise to paradox: if equality of rights is so self-evident, then why did this assertion have to be made and why was it only made in specific times and places? How can human rights be universal if they are no universally recognized?"
This thought-provoking book uses straightforward structure and wording to cover the topic and delves even further into history by exploring the French Enlightenment and the humanities. Hunt attributes literature to founding the principles that our own Constitution was built on. We've certainly come a long way from the barbaric days of trials by ordeal, which Robert Bartlett brings to life brilliantly in Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal. Inventing Human Rights is a great book, add it to your reading list!
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
How compassion works
By Margaret R. Miles
Hunt's thesis, as I read this fine book, is that although compassion was not a new idea in the eighteenth century, injunctions to compassion (from Christianity, for example) were not working to affect public life. Torture, public executions, etc. were habituating Western European populations to high levels of violence in daily life. Associating the rise of the novel to new sensibilities that began to alter society, Hunt argues that novels enabled large numbers of people (especially the designers and administrators of society) to understand the subjectivity of people unlike them, and thus to empathize with the sufferings of others. She suggests that these new sensibilities had real social effects in the development of human rights. Hunt traces these real effects in the language by which human rights came to be seen as universal and "inalienable." Historical theses based on simultaneity can never be proved, but Hunt makes a strong case for novels' ability to make compassion work in eighteenth century Western Europe.
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