Customer Reviews

Inventing Human Rights: A History

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"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).

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.

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.

I felt this book gave a fairly good general overview, but based on the title had hoped it would go into greater depth on the philosophical foundations of human rights (the Enlightenment philosophers etc.)

This book is an overview of human rights as they have been pronounced and practiced over the last 250 years. The principal documents that have described human rights are the Declaration of Independence of 1776, followed shortly by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen by the French National Assembly in 1789, and the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The author does discuss some preconditions for advancing the notion of human rights, but the concept has been vague from the start and this book does little to shore up the concept.

In the first place, many declarations of human rights assume that they are self-evident and then make feeble attempts to define the same - an exercise in contradiction. The author maintains that human rights must be "natural (inherent in human beings); equal (the same for everyone); and universal (applicable everywhere)." But they are "not the rights of humans in a state of nature; ... they are rights in the secular political world." Jeremy Bentham, 18th century thinker, found the notion of natural rights to be "simple nonsense." Jefferson maintains that unalienable rights actually exist in nature. Hobbes on the other hand finds a state of nature to be constant warfare - survival at best. Don't expect any resolution concerning fundamental definitions and contradictions of human rights.

The author notes that the epistolary novel rose in the late 18th century and created empathy for the thoughts and predicaments of common people especially in dealing with social betters. Characters were seen to be autonomous with the capability of exercising sound and independent moral judgments. With the sanctity of the individual also came calls for the elimination of barbarous criminal punishments that persisted well into the late 18th century. The author is not clear as to whether such changes in thinking actually resulted in declarations of human rights; but one can say that they were coincident.

Universal declarations of rights often undergo some sort of slippage to fit nationalistic characteristics and purposes. Discrimination and worse over race, ethnicity, gender, and religion have often been practiced in the twentieth century despite formal declarations of human rights. The notion of different biological characteristics has been used to justify, at the least, unequal application of rights and, at the worst, genocide. Communists and socialists have criticized human rights as permitting property rights to maintain unjust societies. It can hardly be ignored the countless times that human rights have been invoked to justify their very violation. The French reaction to the Revolution is a good place to start.

The book is mildly interesting. It does not grapple in any profound way with the foundation of human rights, how and by whom they are established, and their equitable practice and enforcement. The reality is that rights are far more limited than grandiose declarations and propagandistic nationalistic celebrations imply.

Hunt begins by locating the rise of human rights with the rise of the novel. Eighteenth century literary culture encouraged readers to identify directly and intensely with those unlike themselves--learning to feel what was called sympathy then and is called empathy now for characters on the pages of "Clarissa", "Pamela" (Richardson) and "Julie" (Rousseau) led to the ability to identify with people in utterly different conditions than that of the reader.

She writes that "rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone) and universal (applicable everywhere)" but they were considered universal for some but not for women and only eventually for free black men, Jews, Catholics (in England), Protestants (in France) and slaves (except in the United States).

Her chapter on torture is a cogent discussion how the views of 18th century Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria on legal punishment have influenced the intellectual, moral and political views and practices of kings and emperors, philosophers and revolutionaries, intellectuals and pamphleteers on torture, the death penalty and public criminal proceedings. It is one of the strongest and most incisive sections of the book. Hunt goes a bit overboard in the chapter on the French revolution, discussing it in greater detail than necessary in such a slender volume--which makes sense because she is a specialist in the French revolution.

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.

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.

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?

I like the content of book a lot but want to let others be aware that the kindle version I got is missing all the figures. I sent an inquiry to amazon and was told that some kindle version they received may not be exactly the same as the print version.