| Review of: | Inventing human rights: a history by Lynn Hunt |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Bonny Ibhawoh |
| Reviewed in: | International Affairs |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 83, Issue 06, Pages 1193-1234 |
Book Reviews: Human rights and ethics
Contemporary human rights scholarship suffers from two major flaws. First, it is trapped in an intellectual tradition of linear progressivism that tends to hinder proper understanding of the nuances inherent in the idea of human rights. The trend has been to present human rights-despite frequent setbacks and many contradictions-as part of the saga of relentless human progress. The second flaw is the overwhelmingly presentist character of human rights scholarship, reflected in an inordinate preoccupation with the here and now.
Lynn Hunt's
What this book so eloquently reminds us of are the tensions and contradictions that have historically underlined ideas about human rights. Those who confidently declared rights to be universal in the eighteenth century turned out to have something much less all-inclusive in mind. They excluded those without property, slaves, women and religious minorities from full participation in the political process. Hunt takes the position that while we should not forget these glaring restrictions placed on rights by eighteenth-century men, we should not stop there. The book explores how these men, living in societies built on slavery, subordination and seemingly natural subservience, came to imagine men (and sometimes women) not at all like them as equals. This, the author argues, is crucial to the history of human rights.
One of the most interesting contributions in this study is the connection that it makes between changes in social attitudes and the expansion of human rights. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's
While most of Hunt's arguments are convincing some seem far fetched. One example is her suggestion that reading of accounts of torture had 'physical effects that translated into brain changes and came back out as new concepts about the organizations of social and political life' (p. 33). This claim appears to dabble into the realm of psychoanalysis that is hardly the province of the historian. Another shortcoming that some will find with this book is that it is decidedly Eurocentric. By limiting a discussion on the 'Invention of human rights' to the history of the western world, Hunt lends credence to the construction of human rights as something invented in the West and exported to the rest of the world. Unless used figuratively, the term 'invention' clearly gets in the way of a full historical understanding of the complex cross-cultural processes by which human rights ideas have evolved. It implies too one-sided a happening. In all, however, this book brings a welcome and refreshing perspective to human rights scholarship.