Inventing Human Rights: A History »

Lynn Hunt lives in Los Angeles and is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA. She is the author of many works and the coauthor of Telling the Truth About History.

“A tour de force.”—Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book Review

The Washington Post - Maya Jasanoff

Already by 1776 it had seemed "self-evident," at least to the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, that "all men were created equal." Of course, like all brilliant rhetoric, his claim was both startlingly and deceptively simple: It masked what may have been the most revolutionary (and in practice, controversial) aspect of American independence. For why and when did we ever start to think that human beings were universally equal, let alone obviously so? Lynn Hunt's elegant Inventing Human Rights offers lucid and original answers…Revolutionaries often see themselves as beginning the world anew, but neither the Americans nor the French conjured up their visions of equality and liberty in a void. Hunt skillfully situates their discourse of rights within a series of broader cultural changes that transformed how (Western) human beings related to one another. It is no accident, she argues, that ideas about common humanity emerged at the same time that people began to take an interest in portraiture, to listen to music in contemplative silence and, above all, to read novels. Indeed, Hunt's mastery of the 18th-century European landscape allows the book to double as a fresh interpretation of Enlightenment culture.

Acknowledgments     11
Introduction: "We hold these truths to be self-evident"     15
"Torrents of Emotion": Reading Novels and Imagining Equality     35
"Bone of Their Bone": Abolishing Torture     70
"They Have Set a Great Example": Declaring Rights     113
"There Will be no End of It": The Consequences of Declaring     146
"The Soft Power of Humanity": Why Human Rights Failed, Only to Succeed in the Long Run     176
Three Declarations: 1776, 1789, 1948     215
Notes     230
Permissions     261
Index     263