Inventing Human Rights (review)

Historian Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights intervenes in the current conversation on human rights and literature and continues to flesh out the link between the novel and the rise of human rights by arguing that empathy, brought about through the novel, is vital to cultivating the humanitarian feeling that she argues is necessary for human rights. By linking the history of human rights to both Enlightenment individuality and the French Revolution, Hunt reinforces and furthers the understanding that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) grew out of Western Enlightenment tradition.

The first half of Inventing Human Rights presents Hunt's foundational argument of the link between novels, empathy, and the concept of rights that has received much acclaim since publication. Resting heavily on Benedict Anderson's argument in Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006) that communities are formed through print-capitalism across geographical and temporal boundaries, Hunt argues for the novel's role in facilitating the shift to a secular imagining of what is moral through identification. As the centerpiece of the book, chapter three furthers the argument presented in the first two chapters by tracing the political and rhetorical rise of the actual "document" of change, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Hunt suggests that the UDHR is a direct descendent of the universalism found in the French Declaration and a product of the secular identification through empathy brought about by the novel. The last two chapters explore historical challenges to that ostensible universality through the difficulty of reconciling politically and rhetorically specific claims for rights with the language of the universal, the rise in nationalism, (coupled with xenophobia and racism exacerbated by the imperialism of the nineteenth century) and the limits of empathy. The book gestures hopefully at the end, however, towards the power of human rights and empathy, suggesting that "we must still continually improve on the eighteenth-century version of human rights" (212).

Hunt's argument that rights became linked with self-evidence and political power through reading the eighteenth-century novel that emphasizes individual autonomy relies on examining readers' individual reactions to the eighteenth-century novel since, Hunt argues, historical change occurs on a collective, but individual level: "I believe that social change and political change—in this case, human rights—comes about because many individuals had similar experiences . . . through their interactions with each other and with their reading and viewing, they actually created a new social context" (34). In effect, Hunt argues that the history of ideologies must be understood not only through changes in material conditions, but also through shifting notions of selfhood. Using Rousseau and Richardson as her primary examples, Hunt shows that through these authors' protagonists' struggle for autonomy, readers became more aware of their own and others' individuality, and consequently, humanity: "Human rights could only flourish when people learned to think of others as their equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion" (58). Specifically, female characters and their fight for autonomy in the epistolary novel most compellingly garnered identification and empathy in readers, even in males, because the characters are more fully developed, enlightened, autonomous subjects, and because the reader gains "direct" access through letters to the inner workings of those autonomous subjects. This identification with individuality provides the important link between novels, empathy for others, and human rights. However, as Hunt concedes, we cannot necessarily trace an entirely linear, causal relationship from novels to empathy to rights: "[Novels] did not produce the changes in empathy traced here all on their own, but a closer examination of their reception does show the new learning of empathy in operation" (42).

One of the more compelling and contextual chapters is chapter two, where Hunt discusses the relatively rapid reduction in torture techniques in Europe and the Americas in relation to the rise of individuality, empathy, and human rights discourse. This chapter holds important contextual relevance for today's audiences given that it was published during the Abu Ghraib incident and the continual Guantánamo...