Inventing Human Rights: A History
66 pages • 2-hour read
Lynn HuntInventing Human Rights: A History
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, and religious discrimination.
Empathy as the Engine of Rights
In Inventing Human Rights: A History, Lynn Hunt explains that 18th‑century declarations of rights relied on a new understanding of shared humanity, produced through personal, imaginative experience rather than inculcated through tradition and authority. She traces this change to new cultural forms like the epistolary novel, a style of storytelling that encouraged vivid emotional identification across social boundaries. By drawing readers into the intimate reflections of fictional characters, these novels shaped a new psychology that supported the abstract idea of universal rights by teaching readers to recognize that other people—including working-class and marginalized people—possessed interior lives as rich as their own. This empathy altered political thinking and made equality feel like a self-evident truth.
Hunt highlights the letters in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Jean‑Jacques Rousseau as key tools for this emotional education. Books such as Pamela (1740) and Julie (1761) prompted what contemporary readers described as “torrents of emotion” and a “devouring fire” (36), reactions that cut across class and gender. The use of personal correspondence in the narrative reduced the distance between character and audience. Without any guiding narrator, readers encountered events through the characters’ private voices, which encouraged close identification with the heroines’ desire for virtue and autonomy. Readers did not stop at feeling pity for Pamela, a servant girl, or Julie, a nobleman’s daughter. They imagined stepping into their situations. Men, including officers, told Rousseau that they wept for Julie and felt “the purity of Julie’s emotions” move through their own hearts.
Hunt then turns to Denis Diderot’s comments on Richardson’s Clarissa to show how this new reading experience reshaped moral understanding. Diderot said he felt so absorbed in the novel that he believed he had “acquired experience” and felt himself “drawn to the good with an impetuosity one does not recognize” (56). Hunt uses this response to show how novels built the “interior feeling” that made human rights persuasive. Once readers identified with ordinary figures, they treated selfhood as something rooted in inner depth, and they extended this sense of interiority to others. This recognition of shared emotional capacity suggested a basic equality that reached across social rank. Alexis de Tocqueville captured the point when he wrote that “valets were men” (38). The universal claims of the declarations rested on reason, but they also relied on a common emotional world shaped by the pages of fiction.
The Tendency of Rights to Become More Inclusive
Lynn Hunt shows in Inventing Human Rights that declarations of rights like the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen did more than signal political ideals. They shifted power and created a logic that expanded citizenship. When revolutionaries in America and France announced universal principles, they transferred sovereignty from the monarch to the nation and its citizens. These declarations also set a new test for laws and customs. Once political authority rested on abstract rights, claims from excluded groups followed in steady sequence. The language of universalism created momentum that pushed legislators to face the mismatch between their stated ideals and existing practices, encouraging a gradual expansion of rights.
Hunt begins with the choice to issue a “declaration” rather than a “petition” or “bill.” French deputies in 1789 left out any reference to the king and based their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen on the “natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man” (16). This language meant that the document was an assertion of inherent rights, not a request for the redress of grievances. The legitimate function of the state was to protect the rights that people (though initially only a narrow class of people) already possessed. By listing principles before drafting a constitution, the deputies created a separate standard for political judgment. Hunt shows how this abstract starting point quickly became a flexible tool for change.
This logic appears clearly in the swift expansion of rights to religious minorities. In December 1789, deputies argued that the Declaration’s call for equality required full political rights for Protestants. That move immediately raised questions about other non‑Catholics. Opponents tried to limit the decree to Protestants, but Jewish communities responded with petitions. The Sephardic Jews of southern France pointed to their participation in local politics to defend their claim, which made it harder for the Assembly to withhold rights from the Ashkenazi Jews of the East. The Assembly granted full rights to Ashkenazi Jews in 1791. This chain of events shows how a single rights claim made the exclusion of similar groups untenable.
The same pattern surfaced in debates about the colonies. Deputies of the French National Assembly tried to hold the Declaration’s most far‑reaching implications at bay by excluding the colonies from the constitution. Yet the Declaration’s language encouraged demands from free men of color and helped spark a major uprising of enslaved people in Saint Domingue (now Haiti). When colonial authority collapsed, the French government moved step by step toward new policies, awarding political rights to free Black men in 1792 and ending slavery in 1794. Hunt’s account shows that a declaration begins a political process that continually questions boundaries of inclusion.
The Reactionary Backlash to Universalism
Lynn Hunt argues in Inventing Human Rights that the universalist claims of 18th‑century declarations prompted new energies for inclusion but also produced backlash. She identifies a central tension: Once revolutionaries announced universal equality, defenders of hierarchy searched for fresh ways to justify exclusion. These responses drew on science and biology and turned empathy’s gains against the idea of shared humanity. Modern nationalism, scientific racism, and biological sexism emerged from this conflict with the language of universal rights.
Even those who advocated and fought for universal human rights often sought to limit the scope of those rights. Hunt ascribes this resistance to a failure of imagination—the (mostly white and male) revolutionaries of the 18th century simply could not imagine certain classes of people as fully human. Thomas Jefferson—whose Declaration of Independence famously asserts that all men are created equal—enslaved hundreds of people. Both the American and French revolutions denied political rights to women. Even when political rights were extended to religious minorities and formerly enslaved men, they did not extend to women. The French government shut down women’s political clubs in 1793. Deputies shifted their reasoning from custom to biology and claimed that women’s nature made them unsuited to public life, attempting to set a limit on human rights by classifying women as a fundamentally different kind of human. This change marked a new phase, as biological arguments replaced older forms of justification.
During the 19th century, exclusionary nationalism grew stronger as it replaced the universal “rights of man.” In response to French expansion, German thinkers such as Friedrich Jahn described the nation as an ethnic Volk tied together through blood and inner character. This redefinition encouraged anti‑immigrant movements and xenophobia. A political unit once associated with universal rights became a tool for promoting ethnic purity and limiting the rights of minorities.
Hunt shows that scientific racism formed the most dangerous of these counter‑movements. Thinkers like Arthur de Gobineau built racial hierarchies and argued that history followed fixed traits of groups such as the supposedly superior “Aryans.” This pseudoscience supported imperialism and slavery at the same time that abolitionism gathered strength. It also shaped a harsher form of antisemitism that described Jewish people as a separate and threatening race. These ideas did not revive older customs. They reflected modern attempts to resist the Enlightenment’s claim about shared humanity. Hunt depicts the invention of human rights as the beginning of a continuing struggle in which fresh arguments for division appear whenever universal equality advances.
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