by Lynn Hunt
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Product Description
"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 far and wide. Hunt also shows the continued relevance of human rights in today's world.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 An the rest of the world? What kind of history is this?, 2008-04-11
A very interesting topic, a very important issue, but defined through the eyes of a Cultural Historian that can not see further than her place of birth (the U.S.) or her academic interest (French history). Where is the discussion of the parts of the world that also discussed these issues? Where is Bartolome de Las Casas? Where is Costa Rica that abolished the death penaly in 1870? Why not to talk about the most extreme cases of Human Rights abuses, perpretrated by the French (Algeria) and the U.S. (Latin America, Vietnam)? A great topic is diminished by a square mind.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A Novel Approach to Human Rights, 2007-12-04
Lynn Hunt's primary argument for the increased awareness of human rights in the eighteenth century is a novel one, literally. She argued that as citizens became emotionally involved in novels, they gained empathy skills, and thereafter saw the world in a new way. She drew a connection between the "three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century" with the oncoming concepts of human rights. She chose three novels written by men but focusing on women lead characters: Julie, by Rousseau (1761), Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48), by Samuel Richardson. These novels were epistolary, or written as a series of documents, such as letters. This approach avoided a third person narrator, and increased readers' empathy with the characters. As the readers identified with the characters, they transformed their own worlds around them. Reading about women as lead characters increased women's sense of autonomy.
Prior to the 1760's, European and American society often used torture as a means of crime deterrence and extraction of evidence. As the concept of the sacredness of the human body emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, eyes were opened to the cruel and unusual nature of such punishments. Hunt cited the rise in popularity of portrait painting, increased privacy in houses, and increased appreciation for music as evidence of increased awareness of the sanctity of the individual.
American colonists and French citizens asserted their natural rights by formal declaration. While they maintained rights as citizens of their respective countries, they declared that they had rights that were God-given, to all men. A reigning monarch had no authority to restrict these basic rights. However, once these rights were declared, how far would the implications go? To Jews? To poor men? To criminals? To women and children? Could they all vote and take part in the political process too? John Adams feared that there would be no end to it. Hunt explained that the process of granting rights followed the same pattern in France, England, and the United States. For example, the non-dominant Christian religion first gained rights, then the Jews, and then eventually all religions. In the natural course of events, slaves eventually would gain their freedom, and women would be considered equal.
The rise of nationalism in the early nineteenth century curtailed the universal view of human rights. Germans wanted to be purely German; South American countries wanted to shed Spain from their vestiges. Ethnic minorities became barred from the political process, and countries started to fight against immigration. Sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism took on biological explanations which trumped earlier arguments about the universality of the human experience. Certain people were regarded as naturally inferior, and no legislation could change that. Spiraling down to its nadir, this philosophy concluded in the reign of Adolf Hitler.
After World War II, the United Nations was formed to prevent such future atrocities as had been recently witnessed. However, even with Auschwitz fresh on their minds, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had to be prodded into accepting a human rights declaration, and only agreed when the United Nations stated that it would not interfere with domestic affairs. NGO's like Amnesty International have picked up the baton of enforcement of these rights. However, the fight has a long way to go, as Hunt included "Americans at Abu Ghraib" in her list of continued evidence of problems.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Quick General Overview, 2007-09-11
I found this book very easy to read and engaging but at the end of the day did not find it very substantive. I think it's fine as a general overview of the history of modern human rights, and especially as to the French Revolution, which I believe is the author's specialty. If you are interested in something substantive or heavy duty, this is not the title you're looking for.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Extremely disappointing, 2007-08-28
I have to admit that I find virtually incomprehensible the strong reviews that this book has received in the press (and among some other amazon reviewers). Did they really read the same book? I made it to page 127 (half way) before putting the book down in despair. It's poorly written, badly organized, and as far as I could tell offers little insight into the development of human rights. Some of the arguments presented by the author are downright bizarre. For example, early on, the author declares that widespread reading of torture and epistolarly novels "had physical effects that translated into brain changes," which then led to new ideas about human rights. Weird. The author is a widely respected academic. What happened?
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
 A Long and Unending Journey toward Rights, 2007-06-07
Three hundred years ago, the idea that people in the world should regard themselves as equals or that all had important rights just because they were humans would have largely been regarded as laughable. Now human rights are taken for granted, and even are regarded as more important than that old standard, property rights. How did such a change happen? Lynn Hunt, a professor of modern European history, has some ideas, and has related them in _Inventing Human Rights: A History_ (Norton). There was a Bill of Rights in England in 1689, but it merely referred to "ancient rights and liberties" that derived from the tradition of English law. It did not have what Hunt describes as three interlocking qualities that are essential to human rights: "... rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone) and universal (applicable everywhere)." The acceptance of such rights was a revolution in human thought and in the understanding of how governments were to prioritize their functions. It is a great story, one we can be proud of, and though progress toward acknowledgement of human rights has stumbled and halted at times, it has proved unstoppable.
The boom in concepts of human rights during the eighteenth century can never be fully explained, but Hunt thinks she has a clue. People began to read novels, especially epistolary ones in which characters themselves wrote out their feelings onto the page. Reading such a novel made people view the characters on the pages with empathy because the "narrative form facilitated the development of a 'character,' that is, a person with an inner self." The more lurid of the novels included scenes of torture, producing a revulsion in readers that would eventually help end the long tradition of judicial torture. It is perhaps not coincidental that Thomas Jefferson was a committed novel reader, and it was he who wrote (and the American Congress who approved) the first great proclamation of human rights in 1776. Jefferson's declaration led to the even more influential French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. There seemed an unstoppable cascade of inclusion in France: Protestants and Jews got political rights by 1791, as did men without property in 1792. Slaves were emancipated in 1794. There was, however, a long gap between the American and French declarations and the next comparable document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 which drew upon its two predecessors. Hunt explains that there were forces in the nineteenth century that held human rights back. Pseudo-scientific claims about race and gender cast erroneous doubt on any fundamental human equalities. There was an increase in nationalism, an emphasis on collective efforts rather than on individual liberties. Only after two calamitous world wars was there a reconsideration for declaring the universalism originally engendered in the Enlightenment.
The battle to ensure and extend human rights continues, because governments are eager to impinge upon such rights in order to continue power. Hunt's sharpest examples are about torture. There are some grisly examples given here, and torturing criminals to get confessions or to make them declare their accomplices was simply the way governments used to work. Civil and church lawyers for centuries sorted out just what torture could be applied for just what situation. After the French Declaration, however, it took deputies in France only six weeks to completely abolish judicial torture. Here is the shock, however: Louis XVI had already outlawed torture as a means of getting confessions. But he had allowed it to continue for what was called "the preliminary question," that is to torture the accused into giving out the names of any accomplices. It is disheartening that the current administration finds that it is worthwhile to consider the use of "harsh interrogation" procedures for exactly the same sorts of reasons. Human rights were invented and acknowledged eloquently a couple of centuries ago, but they haven't fully come into force.
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