Thomas Jefferson, one of the framers of the US Constitution and the third US president, is a central figure in Inventing Human Rights as the principal draftsman of the US Declaration of Independence (1776). Operating within the transatlantic Enlightenment, Jefferson articulated the principles of natural, equal, and universal rights that became foundational for modern political thought. For Hunt, Jefferson’s declaration provides the quintessential example of how rights became ‘self-evident’—inherent in humanity rather than granted by a monarch or other authority.

Hunt presents the Declaration of Independence as a pivotal moment where universalist language acquired political force. Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal” and are endowed with “unalienable Rights” serves as an anchor for Hunt’s analysis (15). Jefferson’s declaration transferred sovereignty from a monarch to the people themselves, who were now understood as a community of rights-bearing individuals. The declaration established a new philosophical foundation for government, one based on the consent of the governed and the protection of inherent rights.

Despite his foundational impact on the development of human rights, Jefferson’s life exposes the tensions and limitations of Enlightenment universalism. As an enslaver who penned the most famous articulation of human equality, Jefferson embodies the central paradox of the era. His life and work demonstrate how even the most forward-thinking proponents of rights could fail to apply their principles universally, excluding enslaved people, women, and the propertyless from their vision of a political community. This contradiction does not, in Hunt’s view, invalidate the power of the declaration. Instead, it highlights that the invention of human rights was an ongoing and contested process, whose initial proclamations contained the seeds of future struggles for inclusion.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan-born philosopher and novelist, is a pivotal figure who embodies the cultural mechanisms that made human rights conceivable. Active during the height of the Enlightenment, Rousseau authored both the influential political treatise The Social Contract (1762) and the bestselling epistolary novel Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761). Hunt argues that these two works represent the twin pillars of her thesis: The Social Contract provided the theoretical language for popular sovereignty and natural rights, while Julie cultivated the empathetic sensibility required to make those rights feel self-evident.

Hunt focuses on Julie to demonstrate how new literary forms could retrain human emotions and expand the capacity for empathy. The novel’s narrative, told through a series of letters, immerses readers in the inner lives of its characters, fostering an intense psychological identification that transcended traditional social barriers. As Hunt explains, “Reading Julie opened up its readers to a new form of empathy…[it] enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines” (38). This imaginative experience, she argues, taught readers to see working-class individuals as complex psychological beings worthy of respect and understanding, making the abstract notion of equal rights a felt reality.

The novel’s psychological power derived from its epistolary method, which removed authorial distance and amplified the sense of interiority. Readers did not just observe the characters; they felt with them, participating in their emotional struggles and moral dilemmas. This training in empathy was crucial, as it helped build a new kind of community based on shared feeling rather than on traditional hierarchies of birth or status. Rousseau’s legacy, therefore, is twofold: His political theories permeated revolutionary discourse, but his literary work was equally revolutionary, helping to create the new kind of autonomous, empathetic individual who would demand and defend human rights.

Cesare Beccaria, an Italian jurist and Enlightenment thinker, provides the legal and humanitarian cornerstone of Lynn Hunt’s argument about the changing perception of the human body. His landmark 1764 treatise, Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments), was a radical critique of the prevailing European system of justice, which relied on torture, secret procedures, and brutal public executions. Hunt positions Beccaria as the catalyst for a major shift in penal rationality, one that moved away from religious spectacle and toward a secular, rights-grounded system of justice rooted in “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (81).

Beccaria’s relevance to Hunt’s thesis lies in his condemnation of judicial torture and cruel punishments as irrational, inhumane, and socially destructive. He argued that the purpose of punishment was not to inflict pain as retribution but to deter crime. This required penalties to be certain, public, and, most importantly, proportional to the offense. By attacking torture as a barbaric and unreliable method for discovering truth, Beccaria’s work helped redefine the relationship between the state and the individual body. His arguments resonated deeply with a public whose sensibilities were already changing, giving a powerful new voice to the growing unease with state-sanctioned cruelty.

Beccaria’s ideas were promoted by Voltaire and the French philosophes and influenced penal reform across Europe and in the American colonies. As Hunt notes, his work inspired jurists like William Blackstone, who subsequently argued that criminal law should be “conformable to the dictates of truth and justice, the feelings of humanity, and the indelible rights of mankind” (81). Beccaria thus exemplifies how philosophical arguments against state cruelty helped establish bodily inviolability as a foundational human right, clearing the way for the great declarations of the revolutionary era.

François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was a preeminent French Enlightenment philosopher and polemicist whose campaigns for tolerance and judicial reform illustrate Lynn Hunt’s argument about the power of public outrage. Voltaire’s activism, particularly his defense of the Protestant Jean Calas, who was tortured and executed in 1762 on false charges, serves as a key example of how empathy could be mobilized to challenge religious bigotry and state-sanctioned cruelty. Hunt presents Voltaire as a bridge figure who translated philosophical ideals into a powerful public cause, helping to make intolerance a public scandal.

In his Treatise on Tolerance (1763), written in response to the Calas affair, Voltaire argued that religious persecution constituted a fundamental violation of ‘humanity,’ laying the groundwork for a secular language of rights. By appealing to a shared sense of compassion and reason, Voltaire encouraged his audience to identify with the suffering of a victim from a different religious background, thereby expanding the circle of empathy. He linked the cause of justice to the principles of universal tolerance and due process, demonstrating how public opinion could be harnessed to demand legal and political change.

Voltaire’s legacy was to help normalize the view that judicial cruelty was an archaic and uncivilized practice. His relentless campaigns exposed the brutality of the old penal system and effectively lowered the public’s threshold for acceptable state violence. By connecting emotion, public opinion, and legal reform, Voltaire helped create a cultural climate in which the idea of protecting the individual from the arbitrary power of the state became a central tenet of modern politics. His work shows how the fight against specific injustices contributed to the broader invention of universal human rights.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, commonly known as Abbé Sieyès, was a French cleric and constitutional theorist who played a pivotal role in the early French Revolution. In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt presents him as the architect of the practical, and often exclusionary, application of universal rights. His influential 1789 pamphlet, What Is the Third Estate?, helped galvanize the political revolution by defining the nation as the common people. More importantly for Hunt’s analysis, Sieyès provides the template for how abstract declarations are translated into concrete institutional rules.

His primary contribution to the discourse on rights was his distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens (67). While he agreed that all inhabitants of a country possessed natural and civil rights (protection of person and property), he argued that only active citizens—men who met a certain tax-paying threshold—should have the right to vote and participate in public affairs. This formulation shows how the universalist claims of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were immediately filtered through political and economic criteria, excluding women, the propertyless, and domestic servants. Sieyès’s framework reveals the tension between the universal promise of rights and the political realities of their implementation, a central theme in Hunt’s work.

The Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher, mathematician, and political reformer, embodies the aspirational and expansionist logic of human rights that Lynn Hunt terms the rights cascade. As an Enlightenment thinker who embraced the Revolution, Condorcet was one of the most consistent and far-reaching advocates for universalism. He argued for the abolition of slavery, religious toleration, and comprehensive educational reform, but his most radical contribution was his vigorous defense of political rights for women, Jewish people, and free people of color.

Condorcet’s importance to Hunt’s argument lies in his relentless effort to push the declared principles of the Revolution to their logical conclusions. In works such as On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790), he insisted that if rights were natural and universal, they could not be logically denied based on religion, race, or sex. He grounded his arguments in a belief in human perfectibility, linking reason and progress directly to the cause of equal rights. By providing the philosophical language for broader inclusion, Condorcet’s work became a blueprint for later egalitarian and feminist movements, demonstrating how the initial declaration of rights unleashed a dynamic process that continually challenged its own limitations.

Adam Smith, the Scottish moral philosopher and political economist, supplies the psychological scaffolding for Lynn Hunt’s thesis on empathy. While best known for The Wealth of Nations (1776), his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), offered a secular morality rooted in empathy, helping to precipitate the ‘interior turn’ Hunt identifies as crucial to the invention of human rights.

Smith’s key contribution was his explanation of how moral judgment arises not from divine command or abstract reason alone, but from the imaginative ability to empathize with others. He proposed the concept of the ‘impartial spectator’—an internalized sense of how others would view one’s actions—as the foundation of conscience. This process of empathetic imagination, whereby an individual places themself in another’s situation, aligns with Hunt’s argument that new cultural forms like the novel trained people to empathize. Smith’s philosophy frames human dignity and moral equality as products of shared sentiments, providing a theoretical basis for a rights culture grounded in the mutual recognition of individual personhood.

Benjamin Rush, an American physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and social reformer, exemplifies the transatlantic movement to humanize punishment based on principles of rights and dignity. Lynn Hunt highlights Rush’s 1787 publication, An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals and upon Society, as a key text articulating the critique of penal spectacle. He argued that public punishments like whipping and the pillory were counterproductive because they brutalized both the offender and the spectators, destroying the sense of shame needed for rehabilitation.

Rush’s work translated Enlightenment humanitarianism into a concrete program for penal reform that advocated for private, rehabilitative penalties over public cruelty. This pivot toward prisons and civic reintegration demonstrates the practical impact of the new sensibilities Hunt describes. For Rush, even criminals possessed an inviolable dignity as human beings. Hunt uses his assertion that criminals “possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations” to show how a new empathetic understanding of the body demanded an end to punishments that assaulted human dignity (76). Rush’s efforts helped inspire the first American penitentiaries, tracing the institutional legacy of a new, rights-based view of the person.