AUTHOR: Hunt, who is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA, is clearly qualified to reinterpret the invention of human rights. She made her name as a historian with the by now classic Inventing the French Revolution (1984), which put the cultural approach to the French Revolution on the map in the Anglo-Saxon world. Besides the French Revolution, she has published widely on historical method and epistemology, as well as on western civilization in general, and the development of human rights specifically
Hunt, the Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a distinguished expert on 18th-century France, says that “human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone) and universal (applicable everywhere).” This conception of human rights, she explains, had its origins in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century. Although the English had issued a Bill of Rights in 1689, that document derived from the particularities of English law and English history and did not declare the equality, universality or naturalness of rights. It was left to Thomas Jefferson and the American Congress in 1776 to issue the first notable human rights proclamation. But it was the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 that had the greatest impact on Western thinking. Hunt readily concedes that many people, including men without property, slaves and women, were left out of these declarations of universal and equal rights. Thus “we should not forget the restrictions placed on rights by 18th-century men, but to stop there,” she says, “patting ourselves on the back for our own comparative ‘advancement,’ is to miss the point. How did these men, living in societies built on slavery, subordination and seemingly natural subservience, ever come to imagine men not at all like them and, in some cases, women too, as equals?” Answering this question, she says, will help us “understand better what human rights mean to us today.”
Inventing Human Rights expands on the intellectual history of human rights in two important ways. First, it makes clear that intellectual advances and revolutionary declarations were only possible as a result of a fundamental change in the meaning of the self.New kinds of individual experiences of empathy were created, in the course of the eighteenth century, which in turn made possible the invention of
human rights.
Second, the book shows that most of the late eighteenth
century advances in the establishment of human rights were again
reversed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which were
characterized by nationalist, racist, sexist, and prejudiced movements.
Paradoxically, as Hunt argues, the discriminatory character of these
movements was particularly strong, precisely as a result of the invention
of human rights.
In Inventing Human Rights, Hunt again centers on cultural shifts to
demonstrate how new experiences and ideas of empathy, as well as
individuality and autonomy, were created in the course of the eighteenth
century.
In the first chapter of the book, she discusses, for example, the
transformation of opera goers from social beings, who conversed with
their friends during the performance, to individuals who listened to music
in silence, allowing them to feel strong personal emotions. Hunt also
analyses changes in domestic architecture, such as the construction of
separate bedrooms, and the eighteenth century rise in the production of
portraits, which highlighted the individuality of the ordinary person.
EPISTOLARY NOVELS
However, above all, she stresses the importance of the popularity of the
epistolary novel, a novel composed in the form of a letter exchange. She
maintains that the reading of these novels appears pertinent, as the
heyday of the epistolary novel coincides chronologically with the birth of
human rights. Thus, Hunt not only analyzes Rousseau’s Social Contract, as most histories of human rights do, but also, and in much more detail, his international best-selling novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, which appeared the year before in 1761. This novel, which went through no less than 115 editions in France, tells the tragic story of a young woman who is forced by her authoritarian father to give up her penniless lover and marry an older Russian soldier, who once saved her father’s life. Hunt asserts that Julie triggered an explosion of emotions among its readers, who enthusiastically wrote letters to Rousseau to testify of the feelings of “devouring fire”, which the novel had stirred. She argues that reading Julie opened people up to new forms of empathy: it enabled the readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines (p. 35-38). Investigating the letters, diaries, and reviews of eighteenth century readers, Hunt shows that other popular epistolary novels, such as Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) by Rousseau’s English predecessor Samuel Richardson, had a similar effect
These books received frenzied popular and critical acclaim, but not because they said anything about constitutions and rights, even allegorically. What they did do, according to Hunt, was to encourage readers to identify with weak female characters who struggled to preserve their autonomy and integrity against various forms of domestic oppression.
By creating such bonds of identification, Hunt argues, the novels helped 18th-century readers understand that all humans resembled them on a fundamental level, and that all humans intrinsically possessed natural, equal rights
This new capacity for empathy is what made the equal possession of human rights “self-evident.” And, Hunt correctly contends, that emotion is still the source of our concern for the victims of cruelty and brutality in our time.
TORTURE
Inventing Human Rights makes clear that the growth of new forms of
empathy established the basis for the articulation of a whole set of human
rights demands. The impact of this development was particularly evident
in relation to torture, to which an entire chapter of the book is devoted.
Hunt maintains that throughout the early modern period judicially
supervised torture and cruel punishments functioned as sacrificial rites to
restore the moral, political, and religious order. In this constellation, pain
did not fully belong to the individual condemned person, but served a
higher religious or political purpose. In the second half of the eighteenth
century, as a result of the changes in the meaning and experience of the
self, pain was increasingly only associated with the sufferer, and torture
and punishment gradually lost their political and religious function. In
turn, this inspired a growing resistance against the judicial use of torture,
which was now considered an assault on society rather than an
affirmation. Hunt emphasizes that this development was not first and
foremost a consequence of the claims of enlightenment writers, but because
people started to ‘recognize in other people the same passions,
sentiments, and sympathies as in themselves’ (p. 112).
Torture and cruel punishments ended, she says, not because judges gave up on them or because Enlightenment writers opposed them, but because “the traditional framework of pain and personhood fell apart, to be replaced, bit by bit, by a new framework, in which individuals … recognized in other people the same passions, sentiments and sympathies as in themselves.”
Ultimately the changes in the experience of the self and the other were
reflected in the late eighteenth century revolutionary declarations.
Particularly interesting is that Hunt claims that these declarations did not
just simply signal transformations in general attitudes, but had a self propelling
effect. In Hunt’s words: ‘declaring opened up whole new
political vistas’ (p. 114). For example, the French Declaration, echoing the
changing views on torture and cruel punishment, proclaimed that the
law should be the same for everyone and should not permit arbitrary imprisonment
or punishment. This general statement was quickly followed
by more specific decrees, which on the basis of this declaration abolished
all forms of torture. Precisely the general character of declarations offered
the opportunity to change a broad set of social, political, and judicial
relations. How this worked can be clearly observed in the case of the
French religious minorities, which previously did not have any political
rights. After the declaration of 1789, first the Protestants used the general
claims on the equality of all men to demand political rights. Subsequently,
other religious minorities successfully took up this demand.
Hunt calls this the ‘inner logic’ of human rights (p.150).
The final chapter of the book discusses the reversal of the human rights
regime in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a
result of the rise of nationalist, imperialist, socialist, communist, and, fascist movements. Hunt notes that the xenophobic, sexist, racist, and
anti-Semitic character of these movements, which became particularly
virulent, is closely related to the universalism of the human rights regime.
The universal claims concerning the natural equality of all mankind
called forth equally global claims about natural difference. She
emphasizes that after the French Revolution, differences could no longer
be asserted on the basis of tradition, custom, or history. Differences
needed a more solid foundation. ‘As a consequence, the nineteenth
century witnessed an explosion in biological explanations of difference’ (p.
186). In the 19th century, however, rights became attached to particular nations and ethnicities, and they lost much of their equal and universal character. “It took two devastating world wars,” Hunt writes, “to shatter this confidence in the nation.”
The Napoleonic Wars led to the mixed blessing of nationalism—at first a movement of self-determination but then turning to exclusivity and xenophobia—and then two major wars of the 20th century. Certain concepts quite antithetical to human rights—anti-Semitism, in particular—became quite virulent in the late 19th century and led to Hitler’s Final Solution. Only after the end of the second world war was there significant talk again about human rights in connection with the establishment of the United Nations. But there was much opposition to explicitly spelling it out: Despite the emerging evidence of Nazi crimes against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others, the diplomats meeting in San Francisco [to create the United Nations] had to be prodded and pushed to put human rights on the agenda. In 1944, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had both rejected proposals to include human rights in the charter of the United Nations. Britain feared the encouragement such an action might afford to independence movements in its colonies, and the Soviet Union wanted no interference in its now expanding sphere of influence. In addition, the United States had initially opposed China’s suggestion that the charter include a statement on the equality of races. (pg. 202) It took some work, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was finalized in 1948. Article 1 states “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
In the light of the discriminatory character of many of the nineteenth and early twentieth century political movements, as well as the brutality of the two World Wars, Hunt comes to the conclusion that the development of human rights had failed, Then to immediately add that they succeeded in the long run. Ultimately, the revelations about the horrors of the Second World War created the opportunity to establish the Universal Declaration of Human Rights As Hunt’s book makes clear:
even though human rights are proclaimed, it remains very difficult to
enforce them.
This is certainly not to say that the
conception of this declaration did not meet any opposition. Especially the
Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain had their objections.
Only because many medium-size Latin American and Asian states, which
resented the domination of the great powers, as well as ‘a multitude of
religious, labor, women’s, and civic organizations’ strongly rallied for the declaration, was it eventually established by the United Nations. This crystallized, according to Hunt, 150 years of struggle, during most of which only ‘benevolent societies had kept the flame of universal human rights burning’ (p. 205).
CRITISICM
It should be noted that despite its originality, Inventing Human Rights
still offers a rather traditional modernization type of history of the
establishment of human rights, which makes it difficult to account for the
exceptions a
nd reversals in this development. This is particularly clear in
the first chapters, which argue that the new experiences of empathy have
led to the establishment of the human rights regime. While Hunt
convincingly demonstrates that empathy played a role in this development,
her explanation of how specific rights were established and again
reversed, is much less persuasive. For example, it is not altogether clear
why various religious minorities obtained political rights, but women
continued to be excluded from these rights. In fact, it was only from the
end of the nineteenth century onwards that women started to gain the
right to vote in national elections. Apparently, the new experiences of
empathy did not include women, and neither did the ‘inner logic’ of
human rights always work as advertised by Hunt. To explain this discrepancy,
Hunt has to invoke an alternative explanation: she argues that
there was a sort of ‘conceivability scale’, in which ‘granting rights to some
groups (Protestants, for example) was more easily imagined than granting
them to others (women)’ (p. 150). To this she adds that ‘women simply
did not constitute a clearly separate and distinguishable political category
before the Revolution’ (p. 169). Yet, she does not explain why specific
groups failed to become a political category, whereas others succeeded.
Neither does she explain how certain groups eventually obtained political
rights. Given Hunt’s explanatory framework, the reversal of the human rights
regime in the years after 1800 is even more puzzling. On the basis of the
transformation of the self and the logic of human rights, we would expect
this regime to strengthen instead of falter. Consequently, Hunt has to fall
back on the traditional interpretation of the revolutionary period: as an
era of struggle between ‘the rights of man on one side and traditional
hierarchical society on the other’ (p. 177). This suggests that human rights
were blocked and ultimately reversed by the forces of the ancien regime.
It is particularly striking that Hunt invokes such a traditional reading of
the struggle over human rights, since precisely the research on political
cultural history, to whic
h Hunt has made important contributions, demonstrates
that the revolutionary era cannot simply be interpreted as a
confrontation between traditional and modern forces. Instead, political
cultural historians show that in the course of the French revolution a
wide variety of political concepts, identities and actors were constructed,
transformed, and again discarded (for an overview see: Baker 1987-94).
Consequently, the revolutionary era and the development of human
rights were not simply determined by a confrontation between two
camps, but by a highly complicated power struggle, in which changing revolutionary
groups clashed and cooperated with each other. This suggests
that ultimately we can only understand the institutionalization of human
rights – their founding, reversal, reestablishment, and partial enforcement
– through a detailed analysis of the complex power struggles which have
occurred in different historical periods, and between ever-changing
political actors. All this obviously goes beyond the scope of Inventing Human Rights. Nevertheless, it is a testimony to its strength that it stimulates us to also question the role of human rights in our contemporary world
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