Inventing Human Rights – A History - Softcover

Lynn Hunt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393331997 ISBN 13: 9780393331998

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

Synopsis

How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.

About this title

Review:

Rich, elegant, and persuasive.

Elegant... intriguing, if not audacious... Hunt is an astute historian.--Joanna Bourke

Fast-paced, provocative, and ultimately optimistic. Declarations, she writes, are not empty words but transformative; they make us want to become the people they claim we are.

A provocative and engaging history of the political impact of human rights.--Gary J. Bass

This is a wonderful story of the emergence and development of the powerful idea of human rights, written by one of the leading historians of our time.--Amartya Sen

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 to 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

Synopsis:

Human rights is a concept that only came to the forefront during the eighteenth century. When the American Declaration of Independence declared "all men are created equal" and the French proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they were bringing a new guarantee into the world. Professor Lynn Hunt questions why it happened then and how such a revelation came to pass. In this extraordinary work of cultural and intellectual history, she grounds the creation of human rights in the changes that authors brought to literature, the rejection of torture as a means of finding out truth and the spread of empathy. Hunt traces the amazing rise of rights, their momentous eclipse in the nineteenth century and their culmination as a principle with the United Nations' proclamation in 1948. She finishes this work with a diagnosis of the state of human rights today.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0393331997
• ISBN 13: 9780393331998
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272