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Inventing Human Rights: A History. By lynn hunt. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. 272 pp. $48.40 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).
Lynn Hunt's latest book demonstrates that she has been working on the themes of its respective chapters for many years. The work derives its strengths from her well-established authority on eighteenth-century European literature, pre- and postrevolutionary political debate, and the interface between urban and rural constituencies as they melded and reformed in the context of extreme violence. The first four chapters stand alone as lucid and well-researched original essays on four components of a historiographical debate familiar to scholars of revolutionary France. Collectively these chapters turn around a key question: In what context did the ambiguous "language of human rights" emerge?
Chapter 1 explores the emergence of emotional "interiority" (p. 48) in the pre-Revolutionary French and British novel. Novels, she argues, prelude self-determination, sympathy, and sensibility as a "path to human rights" (p. 68). Chapter 2 offers a framework for understanding the fundamental role of the guillotine in the revolutionary era. The historical emergence of the concept of a "prompt" death, possibly with dignity, in urban and provincial France, is part of Hunt's broader argument for the emergence of a "self-contained person" (p. 82), against which torture and public cruelty spectacles defused into cautionary humane punishment. Chapters 1 and 2 complement each other, as emotion does to reason. Chapters 3 and 4 stand together as a history of this declarative epoch, within the wider context of...