Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007) is a work of cultural and intellectual history that explores the origins of the modern concept of human rights. The book argues that universal rights were not discovered through philosophical reason alone but were “invented” during the 18th century as a result of profound changes in individual psychology and feeling. Hunt posits that new cultural experiences, particularly the rise of the epistolary novel and a growing revulsion toward judicial torture, cultivated a new capacity for “imagined empathy” and a sense of individual autonomy. This transformation in sensibility, she contends, provided the emotional foundation that made the abstract claims of the American and French declarations of rights feel “self-evident.” As a leading scholar of the French Revolution and the “new cultural history,” Hunt grounds her argument in an analysis of how feelings and ideas interact. The book traces how the new psychology fostered Empathy as the Engine of Rights, making the idea of universal equality emotionally plausible. It then examines how the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 show The Tendency of Rights to Become More Inclusive, unleashing a logic that forced debates over the inclusion of previously marginalized groups. Finally, Hunt analyzes the rise of The Reactionary Backlash to Universalism, arguing that the assertion of universal equality provoked the development of countervailing ideologies like scientific racism and exclusionary nationalism. Inventing Human Rights was widely praised and received the Koret International Book Award.

This guide refers to the 2008 paperback edition published by W. W. Norton & Company.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, racism, religious discrimination, rape, gender discrimination, antigay bias, and ableism.

Summary

The book opens by comparing the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Both documents transformed political grievances into lasting proclamations of universal human rights. Hunt introduces what she calls “the paradox of self-evidence” (19): If these rights are “self-evident,” why did they need to be declared at specific historical moments, and why were they not universally recognized? For rights to become self-evident, people needed an “interior feeling” based on two new cultural concepts: individual autonomy (the sense that people are separate and capable of independent moral judgment) and empathy (the ability to imagine another person’s experience as if it were one’s own). New cultural experiences in the 18th century, such as epistolary novels and changing views on torture, created a flourishing of empathy that provided the emotional foundation for the political claims of human rights.

The emotional impact of 18th-century epistolary novels, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, taught readers a new form of empathy. The letter format allowed readers to experience the characters’ inner psychology directly, fostering identification with ordinary people across traditional class and gender lines. Through these novels, readers learned that all people possess a rich interior life and a desire for autonomy, creating a sense of fundamental equality. This development was part of a broader cultural preoccupation with individual autonomy, a central theme of the Enlightenment reflected in Enlightenment philosophy, new educational theories, and revolutionary French laws that expanded self-determination within the family by abolishing primogeniture and instituting divorce. While female heroines were central to this empathetic development, women themselves were largely excluded from political rights, though they did gain important new civil rights during the French Revolution.

The campaign against judicial torture is linked to a fundamental shift in the perception of the human body. The French philosopher Voltaire wrote of the 1762 case of Jean Calas, a French Protestant who was tortured and executed in the public square. This event highlights the widespread use of cruel public punishments in 18th-century Europe. The publication of Cesare Beccaria’s Essay on Crimes and Punishments in 1764 catalyzed a reform movement that argued against torture on humanitarian grounds. This campaign was supported by a new view of the body as separate, self-possessed, and inviolable, a trend reflected in new cultural practices like silent listening at concerts, the rise of private bedrooms, and the proliferation of individual portraiture. The traditional view of corporal punishment as a communal, religious rite meant to restore order was replaced by a new view of it as an assault on individual dignity that brutalized spectators and destroyed empathy. Lawyers began writing novelistic briefs to arouse public empathy, framing the legal system itself as barbaric.

Hunt presents the political act of “declaring” rights as a revolutionary transfer of sovereignty from a monarch to the people. The American Revolution fused two traditions of rights language: the particularistic “rights of freeborn Englishmen” and the universalistic “rights of man” derived from natural law theorists like Dutch diplomat Hugo Grotius. To justify independence, the American colonists increasingly relied on universal rights. This American example gave political force to universalist language in Europe, particularly in France, where a constitutional crisis led to the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. This document was profoundly universalist, making no mention of the king, French history, or the Catholic Church. It sparked an international debate between conservative figures like Edmund Burke, who championed tradition, and liberals like Thomas Paine, who defended universal rights. The declaration had immediate consequences, leading to the definitive abolition of judicial torture in France in October 1789 and a complete overhaul of the penal code in 1791, which eliminated cruel punishments and replaced religious penitence with secular “civic degradation.”

The universal language of the declarations unleashed an unstoppable “logic of rights,” forcing questions about the status of previously excluded groups. Following what Hunt calls a “conceivability scale,” rights were extended sequentially in France. First, Protestants gained full political rights in December 1789. After intense debate and activism, Jewish people gained equal rights in September 1791. The logic of rights also spread to the French colonies. After a period of granting and revoking rights for free men of color, they were granted full political rights in April 1792. The massive revolt by enslaved people in Saint Domingue, which began in August 1791, ultimately forced the legislature to abolish enslavement in all French colonies in February 1794. Women ranked lowest on the conceivability scale. Though advocates like Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges argued for their political rights, women’s political clubs were suppressed in 1793. However, women did gain significant new civil rights, including equal inheritance and the right to divorce.

After the Napoleonic era, the universal human rights movement waned, with rights discourse shifting into national frameworks. This decline is attributed to several factors. The association of rights with the French Revolution’s Terror and Napoleon’s imperial aggression prompted a conservative backlash. Nationalism emerged as the dominant 19th-century ideology, shifting focus from universal man to the particular nation. In response to universalist claims, new biological explanations for exclusion produced more virulent forms of scientific racism, sexism, and antisemitism. Finally, socialism and communism offered a critique of individual political rights, arguing instead for social and economic equality.

As 19th-century ideologies like nationalism and socialism shifted the focus of rights, the devastation of the two World Wars, especially the Nazi genocide against Jewish people and other minoritized groups, shattered faith in the nation-state as the ultimate guarantor of rights and created the political will for a new international framework. This led to the creation of the United Nations and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1948 Declaration incorporated both 18th-century political and civil rights and 19th-century social and economic rights. The post-war era saw the slow consolidation of a human rights consensus, driven by anti-colonial movements, the eventual embrace of rights language by European communists, and the rise of non-governmental organizations. The book concludes by reflecting on the “limits of empathy.” While modern media can foster empathy for distant suffering, dehumanizing violence persists. Human rights have “evil twins,” such as ideologies of difference and a sensationalism of violence. Despite these paradoxes, the human rights framework, grounded in the self-evident feeling of horror at its violation, remains the best available bulwark against such evils.