http://lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/contents.html

15 November 2007

Un Dret Egal

David A. Bell Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt

If you want to understand the origins of modern human rights legislation, Lynn

Hunt claims, the place to start is not the philosophical background, or the crises

that the legislation addressed, but 18th-century fiction. The path she follows is not

obvious, by any means – particularly as she has not chosen the fiction that most

directly confronted issues of injustice (Candide, say, or Montesquieu‟s Persian

Letters). Instead, Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and

loves, above all Richardson‟s Pamela and Clarissa, and Rousseau‟s Julie. These

books received frenzied popular and critical acclaim, but not because they said

anything about constitutions and rights, even allegorically. What they did do,

according to Hunt, was to encourage readers to identify with weak female

characters who struggled to preserve their autonomy and integrity against various

forms of domestic oppression. „How many times,‟ Diderot wrote after reading

Richardson, „did I not surprise myself, as it happens to children who have been

taken to the theatre for the first time, crying: “Don‟t believe it, he is deceiving you

. . . If you go there, you will be lost.”‟ By creating such bonds of identification, Hunt

argues, the novels helped 18th-century readers understand that all humans

resembled them on a fundamental level, and that all humans intrinsically

possessed natural, equal rights.

Hunt‟s long-time readers will find this linking of fiction and politics familiar. Some

twenty years ago, she popularised the term „the new cultural history‟ to designate

scholarship that emphasises the role of language and „cultural practices‟ (e.g. habit,

ritual, forms of reading and play etc) in driving historical change. Since then, the

loose school that embraced the label has made cultural history the most dynamic

area within the profession. Hunt herself has done as much as anyone to

demonstrate its promise in a series of luminous studies on the French Revolution

that draw profitably on anthropology, literary theory and psychoanalysis. For

instance, in The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992) she explored

how changing visions of family relations in 18th-century French society lay behind

the radical left‟s hysterical demonisation of Marie-Antoinette, and, more broadly,

behind the transition from a paternalistic monarchy to a fraternal republic. That

book delved into 18th-century art and literature, gathering up representations of

the family from diverse sources and showing how they fit into coherent patterns.

In Inventing Human Rights, Hunt has shifted the focus from revolutionary

democracy to human rights but retained something of the earlier book‟s thesis.

Once again, she argues that a key modern political phenomenon sprang out of

changes within the supposedly private, intimate sphere in mid-18th-century

Western Europe. At first glance, the move seems perilous, not because the personal

and the political aren‟t linked (something historians accepted long ago), but

because of the chronology. Can we really say that human rights were „invented‟ in

any single time and place? Ludger Kühnhardt, in his 1987 study The Universality

of Human Rights, began as far back as the Greeks. Such historians generally

devote considerable space to Thomas Hobbes, who had much to say about „natural

rights‟, and carefully follow the labyrinthine debates among Grotius, Pufendorf,

Locke and Wolff on the same and related subjects, before even reaching the late

18th century. Hunt has little to say on any of this material. And having established

the „invention‟ of human rights in the age of revolutions, she finishes off the rest of

their history, to the present day, in a breezy 38 pages, concentrating on the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The historian Samuel Moyn has

taken her to task for these omissions, and particularly for ignoring the 1960s and

the Helsinki process, which arguably brought the concept of „human rights‟ to the

centre of modern world politics.

Hunt has invited this criticism by giving her book the title Inventing Human

Rights, but the criticism is partly misplaced. As befits a „new cultural historian‟, she

cares less about providing an intellectual genesis of a concept, or following its

particular political uses, than about asking why, at a certain moment, it became

widely accepted – indeed, widely recognised as wholly and irrefutably obvious. A

better title might have been How These Truths Became Self-Evident, because that

is the problem that actually concerns her (she starts with Jefferson and the

Declaration of Independence). As she notes, between 1689, when the Bill of Rights

spoke only of the particular rights of Englishmen, and 1776, when Jefferson

claimed that all men „are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights‟,

something changed fundamentally. Moyn makes a good case that another large

shift occurred in the 20th century, but Hunt‟s point still stands.

For her, the 18th-century discovery that rights were self-evident depended on two

factors. First, people had to learn to see one another as separate, autonomous

individuals possessed of free will. And second, they had to be able to empathise

with one another, to see themselves in one another‟s shoes. Only when they came

to feel, viscerally, that all others deserved the same rights as they did could the

notion of universal, equal, natural rights take hold. Hunt notes further that

„autonomy and empathy are cultural practices.‟ They have histories, and both

changed remarkably during the 18th century. Which is where the novels come in.

Happily, Hunt does not depend solely on novels to make her point, and rapidly

sketches in a much broader cultural background. She draws on Norbert Elias, and

his story of the „ever-rising threshold of shame about bodily functions‟, to trace the

rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical

history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of

„sympathy‟. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards

torture. Here she notes that „an almost complete turnabout in attitudes took place

over a couple of decades.‟ Up to the mid-18th century, most educated Europeans

accepted the legitimacy of the most grisly forms of torture: stretching on the rack,

pincers, forcing gallons of water down the throat, and a form of execution that

involved crushing a person‟s bones, dislocating their limbs, and then stretching

them over a cartwheel and leaving them to die. When Voltaire condemned the

judicial murder of the Protestant Jean Calas in the 1760s, he did not initially

consider the victim‟s „breaking on the wheel‟ worthy of comment. But some years

later he denounced the punishment as inhuman, and by the 1780s torture in

general had come to be almost universally denounced as barbaric and

impermissible.

But it is the novels that matter most to Hunt. She wants to understand how people

came to think in new ways – indeed, literally how their brain chemistry changed

(she cites recent research in cognitive science in an attempt to prove the point). For

her, the only experience powerful and sustained enough to produce these effects

was intense reading. Modern readers of Julie and Pamela, however, may find it

surprising that these novels in particular could induce any physical effects besides

a narcotic one. Our current sensibilities do not generally take well to their massive

helpings of undiluted sentiment. But as literary historians have long pointed out,

18th-century readers reacted very differently. Julie, these readers reported, took

hold of them like „devouring fire‟. The climactic chapters left them, in the words of

one, „shrieking, howling like an animal‟. Readers of Clarissa and Pamela burst into

„passions of crying‟, and wrote to the author that there was „witchcraft in every

page‟. Indeed, the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames spoke of the „waking dream‟

induced by novel-reading, while the cultural Cassandras of the day denounced the

genre as a threat to public morality (they considered women particularly

susceptible to its contagion). This emotional impact, Hunt argues, powerfully

reinforced the lesson in empathy that arose from the particular form of the

epistolary novel, which allowed readers to peep over the shoulders of supposedly

„real‟ letter-writers, and to imagine themselves in their place. The result was deeply

felt instruction in „imagined empathy‟.

In this new cultural context, Hunt suggests, an older language of rights quickly

flowed into new and powerful channels. Even before the American and French

Revolutions, political writers started to refer not only to „natural‟ rights – which

might not apply outside the state of nature – but to „human‟ rights that every

individual possessed intrinsically by virtue of their humanity. They began to speak

of „the rights of man‟. By 1776 the existence of such rights had therefore become

„self-evident‟, at least to Jefferson. Thirteen years later, the authors of the French

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen echoed him in their endorsement of

man‟s „natural, inalienable and sacred rights‟. As Hunt notes, this document in

turn „transformed everyone‟s language virtually overnight‟, as the phrase „the rights

of man‟ and its many translations proliferated in political debates across the

Western world.

But it was not just the language of rights that proliferated. Hunt argues that, in its

wake, a „logic of rights‟ spread as well. It drove the rapid abolition of official torture

across the West. It spurred a curtailment of cruel, unusual and unequal

punishments (if not of the death penalty), and also a perception of institutionalised

social hierarchies as presumptively unjust. In a nice turn of phrase, Hunt speaks of

„the difficulty of maintaining social distinctions in an impatiently equalising world‟.

In France and its empire, the logic led to granting full civil rights to religious

minorities (first Protestants, then Jews), and then, if only temporarily, to black

slaves. It did not do similar things for women but Hunt implicitly takes a stand

against those authors (especially Carole Pateman and Joan Scott) who see a

symbiotic relationship between the rise of equal rights for men and female

subjugation, arguing that modern forms of individuation depend on radical sexual

differentiation. What matters, Hunt argues, is not that the American

revolutionaries did not even consider granting full civil rights for women, or that

the French revolutionaries did consider it, only scornfully to deny it. The very idea

of equal rights laid the groundwork for later liberation. „The promise of those

rights,‟ Hunt pleads, a little whiggishly, „can be denied, suppressed, or just remain

unfulfilled, but it does not die.‟ She does concede that the very assertion of equal

rights, by undermining traditional assertions of racial and sexual difference on the

basis of custom and tradition, helped provoke the „explosion in biological

explanations of difference‟ that occurred in the 19th century. But she holds fast to

her faith in the „logic‟, citing the 1948 Universal Declaration as its 20th-century

vindication.

All this makes for a rich, elegant and persuasive essay. But like all such essays,

Inventing Human Rights raises more questions than it can answer. To begin with,

why does Hunt concentrate so intently on the novel to the exclusion of other

cultural phenomena? She points to the fact that epistolary novels in particular

appeared to remove the authorial point of view, voyeuristically heightening the

sense of their characters‟ „reality‟, and hence the ability of a reader to identify with

them. Yet remarkably, a similar shift of perspective took hold simultaneously

within several different creative arenas. Paul Friedland has shown that striking

new practices arose in the theatre during precisely the same decades that Hunt

highlights. Actors stopped interacting explicitly with audiences and started trying

to give the impression that they were engaged in „real‟ action that the spectators

just happened to be watching, as if an invisible wall stood at the front of the stage.

And, as Michael Fried has argued, painters in the same period began to depict

characters deeply absorbed in their own activities, no more conscious of the

spectator‟s gaze than Pamela seemed to the readers of her letters. So here, too, the

creators of art strove to efface their presence, to present their work as a piece of

reality that the audience could spy on – and therefore to encourage a bond of

identification between the audience and the subjects of the works.

It might also be noted that the 18th century was a period obsessed with the idea of

„emulation‟ – of putting representations of „great men‟ before the eyes of the

population so vividly that their example would lead to widespread imitation. In

France, the century saw the brief transformation of eulogy into an important

literary genre. We should not forget that some of the strongest bonds of

identification in the period were not with fictional characters, but historical ones,

created through the reading of classical writers such as Plutarch; they dominated

the cult of emulation. Rousseau may have led his readers to identify with the

fictional Julie, but as a boy he imagined himself rather as Pericles and Cato: „I

thought myself Greek or Roman; I became the person whose life I was reading,‟ he

wrote in Confessions. A few decades later, Saint-Just lamented that „the world has

been empty since the Romans,‟ who seemed more real to him than his own

contemporaries.

There is also the question of the longer-term causes behind the rise of „imagined

empathy‟. What caused readers to react as they did to the novels (and plays, and

paintings) of the mid-18th century? Hunt hints – but, frustratingly, only hints – at

one important factor. „Adherents of the novel,‟ she writes, „understood that writers

such as Richardson and Rousseau were effectively drawing their readers into daily

life as a kind of substitute religious experience.‟ In talking about the decline of

torture, she notes that „pain, punishment, and the public spectacle of suffering all

gradually lost their religious moorings.‟ In speaking of older, Christian notions of

human dignity, she observes that „the equality of souls in heaven is not the same

thing as equal rights here on earth.‟ Indeed. By any measure, changes in religious

observance, and the decline of specifically Christian notions of sin, had an

enormous amount to do with the developments chronicled in Hunt‟s book. To most

educated Western Europeans before the 18th century, nothing would have seemed

less „self-evident‟ than the possession of copious natural rights by the wretched

creatures of sin who went by the name of humans, who properly could hope for

nothing other than God‟s grace to save their souls. Only once this gloomy shroud of

assumptions had seriously frayed could deists such as Jefferson start to see things

in a new way. It is no coincidence that the greatest pre-Enlightenment theorist of

rights – Thomas Hobbes – was also the man who did most to unmoor Western

understandings of politics from Western understandings of God (what Mark Lilla

nicely calls „the Great Separation‟). Seen from this perspective, Hunt‟s cursory

treatment of Hobbes becomes somewhat less defensible.

A final question that she prompts is why and how the idea of human rights

appealed so powerfully and so deeply to people who did not read novels – or go to

plays, view paintings or read Plutarch. We have plentiful evidence that millions of

ordinary American and French people from well outside the cultural elites eagerly

embraced the new creed of human rights at the end of the 18th century. In my own

research, I came across a speech in large part about the rights of man that was

delivered in Toulouse in 1790 to a unit of revolutionary National Guardsmen who

probably did not even speak standard French, as the speaker used the local dialect.

He insisted „that there is no one, absolutely no one. . . who does not have an equal

right to justice and to life‟s rewards‟ („nou ny a pas cap, absouludoment cap . . . que

n‟ajo un dret egal à la justiço & à las recoumpensos‟). What did these words mean

to the peasants and artisans in his audience? They had not undergone the same

instruction in empathy as their novel-reading contemporaries. But it was thanks to

their actions that the Revolution that proclaimed the Rights of Man was not

stamped out (and stamped out, moreover, by counter-revolutionaries whose

leaders most definitely did read novels, and probably abhorred torture as well).

Historians who want to trace the intellectual genesis of rights can elide these

questions. I wish Hunt, with her focus on how rights became „self-evident‟, had

done more to raise them.

Problems of this sort in fact point to some of the limits of the „new cultural history‟,

enormously fruitful though it has been. Closely linked to the trend in literary

studies known as new historicism, it generally involves close analyses of texts –

and, still more, treating events themselves as „texts‟ to be read. But in doing so, it

tends to flatten the distinction between texts and actions – or, if you will, between

actions and the meanings attributed to actions. At one point, Hunt writes: „Reading

accounts of torture or epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into

brain changes and came back out as new concepts about the organisation of social

and political life.‟ It is a striking statement. But how do the physical effects of

reading about torture – powerful as Hunt shows them to have been – compare to

the physical effects on the brain of actually witnessing torture, to say nothing of

actually undergoing it? Many different sorts of experience can arguably produce a

heightened sense of empathy. In the case of the common people in revolutionary

America or France, one might include the experience of witnessing a blatant

injustice, of taking part in a crowd action, of receiving a National Guardsman‟s

uniform, even of confronting shared starvation. François Mitterrand once wrote

eloquently of the effects of having to share out meagre rations in a German

prisoner-of-war camp: „One has to have seen the new representatives – nobody

knew exactly how they had been appointed – dividing up the black bread into six

slices, equal to the nearest millimetre, under the wide-eyed supervision of

universal suffrage. It was a rare and instructive sight. I was watching the birth of

the social contract.‟ It is a good example (if rose-tinted by hindsight) of how

different kinds of experience can impart a political education as powerfully as

different sorts of reading.

Taking on all these different questions would have led Lynn Hunt far afield, and

stretched her elegant essay into something much more awkward. But the

questions, however difficult, need to be posed. As she has shown, in this book and

throughout her career, there is much to be learned by drawing connections

between the political events that shaped modern politics and the literary

developments that shaped modern sensibilities. Pamela and the Declaration of the

Rights of Man do indeed belong in the same conceptual sphere. But drawing these

connections takes us only so far. It leaves a great deal else, about the age of

revolutions, and the politics that it engendered, a mystery.

David A. Bell‟s most recent book is The First Total War. He teaches French

history at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Other articles by this contributor:

He wouldn’t dare · Bloodletting in Paris

One Does It Like This · Talleyrand

Twilight Approaches · Salon Life in France

Enlightenment’s Errand Boy · The Philosophes and the Republic of Letters

Ruling the Roast · A Nation of Beefeaters

Violets in Their Lapels · Bonapartism

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