A novel sensibility.

Inventing Human Rights

A History

Lynn Hunt 

W. W. Norton, $25.95, 320 pp.

We hold these truths to be self-evident," begins the most famous document in American history. But, asks Lynn Hunt, if these truths are so self-evident, why did they require a declaration? In fact, the ideas that inspired Americans to rebellion--especially the idea that all people are endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights--have never been treated as all that obvious. To take the most obvious example, the current government of the country that claims to live by the ideals of the Declaration of Independence has been routinely violating the rights of prisoners it hopes will yield information about terrorism.

Hunt wants to understand why a concern with human rights emerged in late eighteenth-century Europe and North America. This was not the most propitious time to talk about ideals such as human dignity and the fundamental equality of all people. Slavery still existed. Women were denied a public voice. Suffrage was anything but universal. And yet political philosophers--even, in the case of Thomas Jefferson, those who owned slaves--not only articulated a beautiful idea but spoke as if its realization was inevitable. It is surely worth trying to understand how this came about.

Hunt's most inventive answer to the question involves a brief excursion into the history of the novel. Three novels, and all written by men about women, constitute her focus: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, and Pamela and Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. All were epistolary, which enabled their authors (who claimed only to be the editors of the letters they were reprinting) to step back from the foreground and allowed the fictional characters to develop personalities of their own. Through the emotional events of their lives, including love, rape, and redemption, readers learn to put themselves into the place of another. Such empathy, Hunt argues, was a precondition for the ability of people to imagine what it must be like to be enslaved or tortured. These novels were neither sermons nor philosophical tracts. But that is what made them so powerful. They could encourage a moral sense without didactic moralizing. Readers, who thought they were being entertained, were also being uplifted.

There was a time when a history of human rights would have concentrated on legal texts and diplomatic agreements. But historians in recent years have been more interested in issues of personal identity and daily life than in formal documents, and Hunt reflects this concern. I confess that I tend to tune out when historians start writing about "the body," but this time I did not. For what is being tortured, when torture takes place, other than a human body? Hunt rightly argues that before there could be effective legal conventions against torture, there first had to exist the idea that every body is autonomous from every other body. "Torture ended because the traditional framework of pain and personhood fell apart," she concludes, "to be replaced, bit by bit, by a new framework in which individuals owned their bodies, had rights to their separateness and to bodily invisibility, and recognized in other people the same passions, sentiments, and sympathies as in themselves."

When she does turn to legal documents, Hunt is equally inventive. Why did advocates for human rights make declarations? Declaration, she argues, is an act of sovereignty; it not only announces something, but claims the authority to make the announcement binding. Declarations are thus significant for what they exclude as well as what they include. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, for example, makes no mention of "the king, French tradition, history of custom, or the Catholic Church." Its authors were not only putting human rights on the agenda, they were engaged in transferring authority to the very people whose rights might have been violated under previous regimes.

Historically speaking, campaigns for human rights erupted at the end of the eighteenth century and have been conspicuous since the end of World War II, but they dropped out of public attention for all the years in between. In part this was because nineteenth-century European politics was dominated by nationalism, and so long as nations were engaged in the act of establishing their own sovereignty, universalistic language possessed little traction. As explanations go, this is an interesting one, but it leaves much to be desired. Hunt's stirring account of the origin of human rights is not matched by an effective account of their fragility. If literature and ideas of human autonomy created the conditions by which torture would come to be viewed as repugnant, why does torture still exist? It is true, as Hunt points out, that we now have a remarkable number of organizations and activists who campaign on behalf of human rights. Yet it is equally true that we need them more than ever because human rights are anything but self-evident.

Inventing Human Rights is short, well-written, and wide-ranging. It is a model of academic history meant to inform the general public on a matter about which there is a crying need for clear thinking. As Americans begin to hold their leaders accountable for the mistakes made in the war against terror, this book ought to serve as a guide for thinking about one of the most serious mistakes of all, the belief that America can win that war by revoking the Declaration that brought the nation into being.

Alan Wolfe has published most recently Does American Democracy Still Work? (Yale University Press).