Inventing Human Rights Quotes

“GREAT THINGS sometimes come from rewriting under pressure.”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“Human rights are difficult to pin down because their definition, indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“Reading Rousseasu's Julie opened up its readers to a new form of empathy. Although Rousseau gave currency to the term “rights of man,” human rights are hardly the main subject of his novel, which revolves around passion, love, and virtue. Nevertheless, Julie encouraged a highly charged identification with the characters and in so doing enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines. Eighteenth-century readers, like people before them, empathized with those close to them and with those most obviously like them—their immediate families, their relatives, the people of their parish, in general their customary social equals. But eighteenth-century people had to learn to empathize across more broadly defined boundaries. Alexis de Tocqueville recounts a story told by Voltaire’s secretary about Madame Duchâtelet, who did not hesitate to undress in front of her servants, “not considering it a proven fact that valets were men.” Human rights could only make sense when valets were viewed as men too.³

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The ability to identify across social lines might have been acquired in any number of ways, and I do not pretend that novel reading was the only one. Still, novel reading seems especially pertinent, in part because the heyday of one particular kind of novel—the epistolary novel—coincides chronologically with the birth of human rights. The epistolary novel surged as a genre between the 1760s and 1780s and then rather mysteriously died out in the 1790s. Novels of all sorts had been published before, but they took off as a genre in the eighteenth century, especially after 1740, the date of publication of Richardson’s Pamela. In France, 8 new novels were published in 1701, 52 in 1750, and 112 in 1789. In Britain, the number of new novels increased sixfold between the first decade of the eighteenth century and the 1760s: about 30 new novels appeared every year in the 1770s, 40 per year in the 1780s, and 70 per year in the 1790s. In addition, more people could read, and novels now featured ordinary people as central characters facing the everyday problems of love, marriage, and getting ahead in the world.”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“وقد نص الإعلان الفرنسي صراحة على أن: «الجهل والإهمال وتجاهل حقوق الإنسان هي وحدها أسباب شقاء المجتمع وفساد الحكومات. وفي هذا الصدد لم يختلف عنهما كثيرا «الإعلان العالمي لحقوق الإنسان الذي صيغ في عام ١٩٤٨ . لا شك في أن الإعلان الذي أصدرته الأمم المتحدة حمل نبرة أكثر قانونية عندما نص على أنه: «لما كان الإقرار بما لجميع أعضاء الأسرة البشرية من كرامة أصيلة فيهم، ومن حقوق متساوية وثابتة، يشكل أساس الحرية والعدل والسلام في العالم”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“لكن حدثت هناك طفرة مفاجئة في تطور هذه الممارسات في النصف الثاني من القرن الثامن عشر؛ صارت سلطة الآباء المطلقة على أبنائهم موضع تساؤل، وبدأت جموع الناس تشاهد العروض المسرحية أو تنصت إلى الموسيقى في هدوء، نافس فن تصوير الأشخاص وتصوير مشاهد الحياة اليومية هيمنة اللوحات الزيتية التي تتناول الأساطير والتاريخ التابعة للرسم الأكاديمي، وانتشرت الروايات والصحف، مما أتاح وصول قصص الحياة العادية إلى أيدي قاعدة كبيرة من الجموع، وبدأ الناس يستهجنون كلا من التعذيب الذي كان جزءًا من العملية القضائية، وأشكال العقاب البدني الأكثر تطرفا. كل هذه التغيرات أسهمت في تعزيز الإحساس بالانفصال وامتلاك كل فرد لجسده، بالإضافة إلى إمكانية التعاطف مع الآخرين”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History