FictionThatMatters.org

Inventing Human Rights
by Lynn Hunt. Non-fiction.
Norton, 2007. 272 pages.

Lynn Hunt’s book Inventing Human Rights has an ambitious objective, to chart the birth of human rights from the eighteenth century onwards. What distinguishes this text from others – and makes it important for us – is that Hunt explores cultural trends as well. Human rights did not emerge from a political vacuum, but were accompanied by new developments in the arts. The ability of novels to induce responses in their readers may well have helped abolish torture and create human rights as we know them today.

This book explains, in fine prose, why FictionthatMatters.org exists in the first place. Books can change the way we think — and the way we act.

Punishment in eighteenth century France was horrifically painful and suffered from a lack of procedural protections. You were tortured before trial in order to elicit confessions, then tortured again to implicate your co-conspirators. And your punishment was designed to insure maximum suffering, such as “breaking at the wheel”:

Breaking at the wheel, reserved to men convicted of homicide or highway robbery, took place in two stages. First, the executioner tied the condemned man to an X-shaped cross and systematically crushed the bones in his forearms, legs, thighs, and arms by striking each one with two sharp blows. Using a winch fasted to the halter around the condemned man’s neck, an assistant under the scaffold then dislocated the vertebrae of the neck with violent tugs on the halter. Meanwhile, the executioner struck the midsection with three hard blows of the iron rod. Then the executioner took the broken body and fastened it, limbs bent excruciatingly backward, to a carriage wheel on top of a ten foot pole. There the condemned man remained long after death, concluding ‘a most dreadful spectacle.’

It is hard to imagine that these tortures often occurred in public. Because they served as a sacrificial rite that restored ‘wholeness’ to the community, crowds would arrive and the event could become a raucous party. Torture was somehow meant to serve as a deterrence at the same time that people drank themselves silly. As the jurist Muyart explained in 1767, ‘[p]recisely because each man identified with what happened to another and because he had a natural horror of pain’, the punishments should be more severe and cruel. Seeing someone else suffer for committing a crime would prevent you from doing the same.

This brings us to the most engaging chapter of Inventing Human Rights, which analyzes the influence of literature upon human rights. Hunt argues that this new form of entertainment may have helped stem the use of torture. Examining Richardson’s Pamela (1741) and Clarissa (1748), and Rousseau’s Julie (1761), the author identifies a new means of getting people to care about others. “[R]eading novels,” she writes, “created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative.” This sense of empathy was heightened by the fact that these were epistolary novels, a narrative comprised of a series of letters. Pamela, Clarissa, and Julie were each written in the first person, further heightening their emotional content. The stories followed female heroines and crossed class lines. Men and women alike identified with the characters. “You have driven me crazy about her,” wrote one military officer. “Imagine then the tears that her death must have wrung from me.”

Not long afterward, ‘breaking at the wheel’ and other punishments were abolished.

Hunt is not so bold as to cite these works as the sole creators of human rights. Instead, she notes their simultaneous development at the time that rights discourse was changing. ‘Natural’ rights were being extended to include concepts of equality and universality. The point is that stories were now being written and read with feeling. Decades after Pamela, for example, abolitionists encouraged slaves to pen semi-autobiographical works in the same fashion. The bestsellers of Clarissa, Pamela, and Julie had brought a concept of ‘interiority’ to the fore. Readers now considered others to have inner workings regardless of class differences. Other people could feel things, too, so cruel punishments became more questionable.

Inventing Human Rights goes on to elaborate upon the fascinating development of rights during the French Revolution (1789). Many of the rights that we take for granted today, such as equality, freedom from arbitrary detention, presumed innocence, religious freedom, and freedom of speech were hashed out during this period. Though well written, the book becomes somewhat confusing in this section because Hunt name-drops personages from the French Revolution with abandon. For those of us who are unfamiliar with the period, it may have been more instructive to highlight a few key figures rather than information dump. Indeed, this chapter was the only section of Inventing Human Rights in which my interest waned.

Hunt’s work is admirable in that she does not just celebrate the rise of human rights discourse, but also its backlash. She notes that, while rights language led to an acknowledgment of rights in other peoples (blacks, Jews, Christian minorities, and, long afterwards, women) it also provoked racism and nationalist movements. What worked on paper did not necessarily coincide with the deeply held beliefs of the time. Both Europeans and Americans distinguished between extending rights to citizens at home (male citizens) and their colonial subjects abroad. Poor majorities did not want to share the pie with poor minorities. Afraid of the implications of truly equal rights, racism and anti-Semitism emerged to argue that rights had biological origins. You had to be a member of the correct race or ethnicity to enjoy the proper right. And granting rights to one group did not prevent you from completely ignoring the demands of other groups. “Human rights only become meaningful,” she writes, “when they gain political content.”

The latter portion of the book contains very sweeping summaries of other rights discussions. The author moves from Jeremy Bentham to Karl Marx, from Wagner to World War II. Before we know it we are reading about genocide in Rwanda. I can’t say that this is a fatal flaw: these areas have been written about before so there is no need to dwell upon them. But it calls to mind an important point about reading this book – you probably should also have read about rights before. On no page does the author explain what a right is: that a right requires a corresponding duty, or that some rights require an absence of interference by others, while other rights demand an active duty on the part of others to do something for you.

The author somewhat abruptly ties up her work by returning to her theme of empathy. While new forms of media such as novels and television may have helped establish rights by provoking empathy in its audience, she says, modern weaponry as well as perverse media made violation of those rights that much easier. Progress has been still been made, however, and the current international bodies are the best system that we have. It seems that Hunt’s conclusion is that the future of human rights will require enforcement powers and tipping the balance in favor of empathy over the accessible of tools of violence.

For the purposes of FictionthatMatters.org, this is a great read. Hunt writes with ease and assurance. The book is also full of random factoids that are skillfully woven into the academic tome. Here are a few: at the time of the establishment of Italian national unity (1860s), only 3 percent of the country spoke Standard Italian; in France, only half the country spoke French. The guillotine was invented to be a more humane method of execution. It goes on.

The first chapter will tell you all you need to know about the ability of eighteenth century novels to effect political change. The rest of the book is so mellifluously written as to provide for surprisingly good reading anyway. With its appendix of the Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of Man and Citizen (1789), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Inventing Human Rights becomes a welcome addition to any human rights library.

–Deji Olukotun

Would you like to know more?

The role of empathy in literature has been explored at length by Martha Nussbaum.

Read my lengthy paper on the value of rights and the Critical Legal Studies movement here.

For a great sourcebook on rights, check out Jeremy Waldron’s Nonsense Upon Stilts. (And I mean ‘check it out’ at the library because it is probably too expensive to buy.)

Human rights pole photo by tao_zhyn, liberté photo by chelseagirl on Creative Commons licenses.