The French National Assembly’s charter of August 1789 serves as the central case study in Hunt’s analysis of how declaring rights can shift the locus of sovereignty and trigger subsequent claims. The Declaration broke decisively from tradition by asserting universal, natural, and equal rights for all men (in theory if not in practice), locating sovereignty exclusively in the nation and its citizens, not in the person of a monarch. It defined its principles in abstract and universal terms, proclaiming in its first article that “[m]en are born and remain free and equal in rights” (131). This universalism distinguished it from the English tradition of historically grounded liberties and established a new basis for government legitimacy: the protection of imprescriptible individual rights such as liberty, property, and security.

The act of declaring these rights had a powerful galvanizing effect. By establishing a set of “simple and incontestable principles” (220), the Declaration created an open political space for challenging existing laws and social exclusions. It became a benchmark against which all legislation could be measured, forcing debates about the rights of previously marginalized groups, including religious minorities, people of color, and women. This dynamic led directly to concrete legal changes, such as the October 1789 decree abolishing judicial torture, and set in motion the “cascade of rights” that propelled the French Revolution toward increasingly radical social reforms.

Empathy is the capacity to identify with the inner feelings of unknown others. While this capacity is innately human, Hunt argues that it was refined and intensified by cultural developments in the 18th century, forming the essential foundation for universal human rights. Hunt argues that “what might be termed ‘imagined empathy’ serves as the foundation of human rights rather than of nationalism” (32), because it creates a sense of common humanity that transcends local or national bonds. She identifies two key vehicles for its development. The first was the rise of the epistolary novel, which encouraged readers to passionately identify with the interior lives and struggles for autonomy of ordinary characters. The second was the circulation of graphic accounts of judicial torture, which encouraged readers to imagine the suffering of the condemned as their own. Together, these experiences helped make the abstract idea of equality emotionally credible, allowing people to see others as fundamentally like themselves.

The paradox of self-evidence is the central problem Lynn Hunt seeks to resolve in Inventing Human Rights. The paradox arises from the core claim made by revolutionary declarations: If human rights are truly self-evident, then why did they have to be declared, and why did they only appear at specific historical moments and in certain places? An assertion that is truly self-evident should not require a formal proclamation or defense. Hunt argues that this apparent contradiction shifts the explanation for the origin of human rights away from pure reason and toward emotion and culture. The solution lies not in philosophical discovery but in the development of a new, widely shared psychological disposition. Rights became self-evident only when equality became emotionally plausible. This required an “interior feeling” that, as the Enlightenment writer Denis Diderot noted, is “common both to the philosopher and to the man who has not reflected at all” (26). This inner conviction was cultivated through new experiences of empathy and individual autonomy, which made the idea that all people possessed equal rights feel axiomatic.

The “rights of man” was the specific 18th-century French term for universal natural rights that, unlike its more passive counterparts, became a politically actionable concept. Hunt traces the phrase’s popularization to the years following its appearance in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762), noting that “by June 1763, ‘rights of man’ had become a common term” in French intellectual circles (24). While English speakers often referred to “natural rights” and the term “human rights” existed in both languages, the latter usually denoted a less political concept, referring to what distinguished humans from animals or the divine. In contrast, “rights of man” developed a potent political charge in France. By the spring of 1789, it was no longer just a philosophical phrase but the central demand of a political movement insisting that a formal declaration of these rights must serve as the foundation for any legitimate government, a demand that culminated in the Declaration of August 1789.