A Man With An Agenda

Concise and accessible, Lynn Hunt's 'Inventing Human Rights' presents a good history of the ideas of human rights as they emerged in the Enlightenment.

I liked her first chapter best, where she focuses on Richardson's 'Pamela' and 'Clarissa' and Rousseau's 'Julie' and argues that their ability to provoke strong emotions from readers (hint: not boredom) encouraged empathy from readers for people different than themselves. With the sense of the individual having emerged over the past few centuries, along with an increased desire for separate sleeping areas and concealing bodily functions, that empathy eventually led to the wider campaigns against torture and for civil rights. At least for the men.

Lynn continues with how the radicalism of the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism led to a backlash against the idea of universal human rights. With traditional reasoning for discriminating against Jews, blacks, and other races invalidated, there was a rise of more sinister biological explanations that was further encouraged by the success of imperialism.

The book is capped-off with the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and seen by Hunt as an ultimate victory. The victory comes not from the lack of violations in the world of course, but because the idea of the rights of humanity have become so much a part of our being that there's no going back. I agree with her on paper certainly and it does make for a tidy history, but I can't feel positive about the security of human rights.

But I am reading 'War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning' right now so I can't exactly hold on to notions about the better instincts of humanity.