Book completed
Nov. 14th, 2023 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeInventing Human Rights: A History, by Lynn Hunt. I learned about this book from solri who didn't know its title or author but did know that it existed, and I appreciate that, because it was quite interesting! The author tells the history of the European belief in the idea of universal human rights. In the first chapter, she tells how the early novels-in-letters by Samuel Richardson and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau led people to feel much stronger empathy for those unlike themselves - poor servant girls at the mercy of wicked men. Because they were written as letters, it gave the readers a much better sense of the inner lives of these women and the others in their lives, making it much more likely that they'd be seen as people too, and that rights should be universal for all humans. In the second chapter, she makes the case that people started feeling much more private about their bodies (no longer willing to share a bed in an inn with strangers, etc.) and that this made the idea of torture less acceptable. The third chapter discusses the political consequences of "declaring" human rights, and in the fourth chapter, as more and more groups wanted rights, the fact that they were even mentioned in this context tended to lead toward it eventually happening (except for women, by and large). The last chapter explains how the rise of nationalism, in which "our group" is the best and potentially aggrieved too, increased the motivation to deny rights to others (because they may have held our group back in the past), and since rights are universally human, then the best way to deny them to other groups is to dehumanize those groups. I didn't feel that her arguments necessarily supported all of her ideas, but I did like the first and last chapters.
I was rather tired today, and although I got some work done and went to the store, I mostly read and even napped a bit.
solri who didn't know its title or author but did know that it existed, and I appreciate that, because it was quite interesting! The author tells the history of the European belief in the idea of universal human rights. In the first chapter, she tells how the early novels-in-letters by Samuel Richardson and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau led people to feel much stronger empathy for those unlike themselves - poor servant girls at the mercy of wicked men. Because they were written as letters, it gave the readers a much better sense of the inner lives of these women and the others in their lives, making it much more likely that they'd be seen as people too, and that rights should be universal for all humans. In the second chapter, she makes the case that people started feeling much more private about their bodies (no longer willing to share a bed in an inn with strangers, etc.) and that this made the idea of torture less acceptable. The third chapter discusses the political consequences of "declaring" human rights, and in the fourth chapter, as more and more groups wanted rights, the fact that they were even mentioned in this context tended to lead toward it eventually happening (except for women, by and large). The last chapter explains how the rise of nationalism, in which "our group" is the best and potentially aggrieved too, increased the motivation to deny rights to others (because they may have held our group back in the past), and since rights are universally human, then the best way to deny them to other groups is to dehumanize those groups. I didn't feel that her arguments necessarily supported all of her ideas, but I did like the first and last chapters. I was rather tired today, and although I got some work done and went to the store, I mostly read and even napped a bit.
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Date: 2023-11-17 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-17 09:00 pm (UTC)