Rights and Sentiments

On Tuesday 19 February 2008 the Guardian’s front-page coverage of the collapse of the bank, Northern Rock, included the following:

Ministers are prepared, however, to face down threats of a legal challenge from Northern Rock’s shareholders, who said yesterday that the government’s plan for a temporary period of state ownership infringed their human rights.

I do not know if the shareholders of Northern Rock brought their case, though I doubt that they did, but the fact that they threatened an action under a rights claim is interesting in itself. It is not immediately clear how they may have intended to construct their claim under the framework of human rights – perhaps they imagined themselves having a right to profit from their investment in stocks and shares. Unfortunately, as any investor ought to know, such an assumption is foolhardy since, as the government health warning has it, the value of investments may go down as well as up.

In a rather less tenuous case we are, of course, at the present time living through the prosecution of very significant alleged abuses of human rights, the current US government’s activities at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.¹ In this instance few can doubt the rights claim: torture under any interpretation of international law is prohibited under article five of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as is arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, under article 9. It is, under any construal of the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship in the era of the Universal Declaration, of paramount importance that we not only know what human rights are but also ensure their effective application. But do we need to know the history of their invention? Lynn Hunt, one of the foremost cultural historians of France in the revolutionary period, thinks that we do. In the introduction to the book under review she writes: ‘if we came to know how [the inalienable rights of all men came to be a “self evident-truth”] . . . we would understand better what human rights mean to us today’. (p. 19) I doubt that many readers of this journal would dissent from the view that a better understanding of human rights is a good to be sought after and there is much in Hunt’s book that contributes to that aim.

Hunt begins her volume with a very good question: how did Philadelphians, New Yorkers and Virginians, or the inhabitants of Lille or Paris, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, come to sign up for the notion that ‘everyone’ (although as she points out that inclusiveness has to be qualified in a number of cases: no women, slaves, the propertyless, some religious minorities) is equal in rights? Her answer can be summed up in one word, sympathy; and much of Inventing Human Rights makes a strong case for the signal importance of the development of what might be called ‘affective relations’ during the eighteenth century.

The book opens with an account of the ‘rise of the novel’, paying particular attention to Samuel Richardson’s first two novels, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–8), and to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). In this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, Hunt wishes to draw our attention to what she claims to be a necessary feature of the espousal of human rights, the ability to put ourselves into the shoes of another person. What we call ‘empathy’, which Hunt sees as equivalent to ‘sympathy’ in the eighteenth century, is the ground upon which human rights are constructed. Given this, the emergence of the novel in Britain and France in the middle decades of the eighteenth century provides ample evidence for a new way of understanding relations between human subjects, namely the ‘identification’ practices which are promoted and encouraged by a certain kind of reading activity. Histories of the novel and, more recently, histories of the practices of reading have long been fascinated by the period’s self...