George Hoare
posted 4 May 2007

Human rights, Lynn Hunt asserts, ‘are not just a doctrine formulated in documents; they rest on a disposition toward other people, a set of convictions about what people are like and how they know right and wrong in the secular world’ (p27).

Through the course of Inventing Human Rights she documents the fascinating ways in which these dispositions were formed by literature in the eighteenth century – ranging from often quite gruesome accounts of torture to novels, such as Rousseau’s, in which the heroines wrote letters exposing their inner selves – and other new societal changes (such as rise of the ‘self-contained person’ who no longer sleeps in the same bed as strangers, nor wipes bodily excretions on their clothes). Hunt’s argument is that human rights were thus invented by the diffusion of these new ways of reading and interacting which, critically, helped spread the practices of empathy (identifying with another and recognising their rights) and autonomy, ultimately engendering the attitudinal preconditions for the great declarations of human rights of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. However, despite both the plausibility and richness of Hunt’s account, and the importance of studying sociological processes of attitude formation, she never quite escapes the charge that her particular brand of intellectual history is simply not susceptible to being falsified or proven.

Human rights is a concept that only came to prominence during the eighteenth century; when the Americans declared both their independence and that it is self-evident that ‘all men are created equal’, or the French revolutionaries declared ‘the purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptable rights of man’, they instituted a new moral basis for political authority around the world. The central questions Lynn Hunt seeks to address are how human rights were invented, and why this invention – and its self-evidence – occurred in the eighteenth century.

Hunt contends, most basically, that the internalisation of ideas of equality and empathy in the mid-eighteenth century were key to the massive social and political changes (particularly the two famous declarations) that occurred in that period. Political change – in this case the particular form of political authority encapsulated in the declarations – comes about because new experiences create a new social context, and corresponding pressures to enshrine the reality of social relations in positive law. Personally, I find this an eminently plausible mechanism for social change; at the same time, though, it suffers from two problems (and this is assuming that we accept Hunt’s conception of human rights as containing content expressed in the substance of individual social relations).

The first difficulty, as Hunt goes some way to conceding, is that ‘there is no easy or obvious way to prove or even measure the effect of new cultural experiences on eighteenth-century people, much less on their conceptions of rights’ (p32). Even contemporary studies in neuroscience and cognitive psychology on the effect of television or computer games- is popular culture making us dumber?- find it difficult to make any real headway into linking the complex biology of the brain to behavioural or social outcomes. Perhaps, though, it is too harsh on Hunt to impose this sort of standard of testability on her claims; most historians, indeed, would probably agree to some extent that any society influences, through a concatenation of social and cultural factors, its citizens’ conceptions of selfhood, and that these conceptions of selfhood are important in creating preconditions for social change.

Further, Hunt is surely right in insisting that ‘any account of historical change must in the end account for the alteration of individual minds’ (p34), and, perhaps more importantly in explaining the contribution of her book to human rights history, that scholars have written at great length about the emergence of individualism and autonomy as doctrines, but largely ignored the views of bodies and selves – the change of the self over time – that made these doctrines possible. It might seem, then, that Hunt sets herself an important but impossible task: it is simply not possible definitively to defend the idea that ‘reading accounts of torture or epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes and came back as new concepts about the organisation of social and political life’ (p33), even if we, in the end, find it hard to disagree.

The second difficulty is as follows. Hunt might well be right – even if to prove it seems a tall task – to claim first that political change comes about when new experiences create a new social context for individuals, and second that novels and accounts of torture expanded the means for people, crucially, to empathise across class and gender backgrounds. But it is difficult for her argument to achieve anything other than plausibility if we cannot specify whether literary experiences preceded or followed other social changes; in short it seems beyond the scope of her book for Hunt to account for why the self-evidence of human rights, which formed the basis of the famous declarations, arose when it did. For example, it is known that boundaries between human bodies became more sharply defined from the fifteenth century as public defecation and urination became increasingly repellent, as did spitting and eating out of a common bowl. If the changes Hunt traces occurred as a reaction to these separate social trends, then it becomes more difficult to contend that human rights were invented because of the effects of epistolary novels on internalising empathy. Perhaps this is a weakness inherent in intellectual history which attempts to trace large-scale changes in individual dispositions over time: it is an incredibly challenging task to confirm causality, or even, in some cases, temporal order.

Maybe it is easy to be unreasonably hard on Hunt – there is, after all, much to recommend in her book, and her explanation of social change looks at that which scholars have previously ignored, and which is surely valuable. Particularly memorable (though perhaps for the wrong reasons) is her description of the judicially sanctioned torture of a French Protestant from Toulouse called Jean Calas, who was accused of murdering his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism, and died protesting his (likely) innocence. The judges sentenced Calas to death by breaking on the wheel: the condemned man would first be tied to an X-shaped cross and then have the bones in his forearms, arms, legs, and thighs systematically broken with two sharp blows to each with an iron rod; the vertebrae of the neck would then be dislocated by a presumably sadistic executioner’s assistant using a winch fastened to a halter around the condemned’s neck; finally, after the midriff was struck three times with the iron rod, the broken body would be fastened, with the limbs bent excruciatingly backward, to a carriage wheel on top of a ten-foot pole.

The torture, though, occurred before all this: the ‘preliminary question’, which was designed to get the already convicted to name their accomplices, involved not only stretching the condemned by a series of cranks and pulleys, but also forcing pitchers of water down the victim’s throat. The Calas ‘affair’ was taken up by Voltaire in the months after the execution, and seemed to capture the public imagination, leading (with other factors) to the French monarchy eliminating the use of torture to extract confessions of guilt before sentencing in 1780 and, eight years later, provisionally abolishing the use of torture just prior to execution to produce the names of accomplices. Hunt’s point here is well-made: there must be something which explains not only why Voltaire got so animated about a practice which had occurred in some form or another since the revival of Roman law and the example of the Catholic Inquisition in the thirteenth century, but, more importantly, why people saw this torture as not only cruel, but something warranting change (its abolition). The constraints of custom do change, and Hunt goes some way to providing a way in which they do (through individual minds), even if it is under-determined why the change occurs when it does.

Finally, despite these difficulties, I would contend that Hunt’s account becomes increasingly relevant the more we think about the status of human rights today. Hunt concludes by offering us a prescription, drawing from the long period of ‘failure’ of human rights (their historical and socially relative non-universalism; biological arguments for group exclusion; their repeated violation, even or especially in the twentieth century) from the French Declaration in 1789 to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: ‘the history of human rights shows that rights are best defended in the end by feelings, convictions, and actions of multitudes of individuals who demand responses that accord with their inner sense of outrage’ (p213, italics added).

In the UK, the fate of the Human Rights Act 1998, which came into effect in 2000, shows the extent to which human rights are currently under attack both in the media and, more worryingly, in governmental murmurs about appealing the Act altogether. The effect of 9/11 on a fledgling human rights Act is difficult to gauge but it is clear that anti-terror controls are being used to place greater restrictions on speech and institute higher pre-charge detentions; it is becoming increasingly (and worryingly) clear that the universality of our human rights is threatened by the use of these anti-terror measures. Following Hunt’s account, perhaps it is now the media, rather than novels, that represent the greatest way for us to empathise with others, which makes their denigration of the Human Rights Act particularly dangerous, and something we ought to challenge vociferously. And, moreover, perhaps we should trust and follow our inner sense of outrage at the rights violations we hear about to in order both to protect the universalism of our human rights and ultimately to validate their content beyond documents and into our own dispositions.