Who Invented Human Rights? A Book Review
Kind of a review. A bit of a reflection I guess. Whatever. Footnoting on here is hard.
In Inventing Human Rights: A History Lynn Hunt examines the following question, “How did equality of rights become a ‘self-evident’ truth in such unlikely places?” The “unlikely” refers to “societies built on slavery, subordination, and seemingly natural subservience,” specifically, Europe and the European colonies in America.[1] Hunt traces the intellectual history of human rights, taking Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as her starting points and ending with the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hunt examines the psychological, emotional, and biological changes that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people went through as cultural ideas about bodily autonomy, individuality, and empathy transformed. As Hunt writes, “reading accounts of torture or epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes and came back out as new concepts about the organization of social and political life.”[2] Hunt argues that ideas about universal human rights only came about because of these cultural and biological changes. She also contends that the Declarations opened up the way for the development of a greater universal system of rights than originally conceived. Hunt grounds her argument French and English sources, as well as some archival materials from the English colonies in North America. Hunt uses the writings of European and colonial luminaries as her main source base in this work of intellectual history. She contributes to the human rights’ historiography through her attempts to limit a field she see as growing too diffuse and a re-centering of the three Declaration’s as focal points in human rights history
Hunt’s work moves quickly helped along by a fluid writing style that allows for an easy transfer of information. Hunt organizes Inventing Human Rights both thematically and chronologically but never in a way that allows for confusion. She has a clear command of the archival sources, particularly of the French ones, using them in the original language and engaging with them on multiple levels. While she does not claim to have found whole troves of new sources, she does engage with well-known source in a different way, an important skill and feat of its own. My biggest critique comes from the fact that she does not interact with the historiography to a large degree. Neither the main body of the text, nor the footnotes contain much historiographical information. Foucault, perhaps the biggest name she is working against, only gets mentioned once in the footnotes in a single sentence.[3] As Hunt undertakes a revision of Foucault’s work, particularly in the sections on torture and the development of individual autonomy, a larger discussion of the historical tradition she’s working in would have been beneficial. Deeper interactions with the historiography would reveal many authors who convincingly argue that the nationalism that arose from French Revolution has done more harm to the concept of human rights than Hunt gives it credit for. Similarly, a few places exist where citations would have been helpful, particularly when she claims that some Arab countries still teach The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in schools.[4] While this was written for a more popular audience, it is quite an effective work that offers a great overview of the development of human rights in the Europe and the American colonies.
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[1] Hunt, 19 [2] Ibid., 33 [3] Hunt, 234 (footnote 16) [4] Hunt, 196