Book description
How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Inventing Human Rights as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Many human rights activists have to be focused intensely on the events of today and the consequences for tomorrow, this often allows little time for broader reading. Lynn Hunt offers a detailed and very readable analysis and argument of the history and development of contemporary human rights. I found all of her book illuminating and the connections she described eye-opening.
From Duncan's list on The best books about protest.
This book sits on my bookcase right next to Jean Starobinski’s wonderful The Invention of Liberty. Both books promise an analysis of the rise of a specific concept – human rights and liberty – during an era where classical liberalism as we know it was taking shape. What I love about Hunt’s book is that she not only puts a tracer on the notion of human rights in political discourse; she tells a story of how human rights arose from a set of psychological and epistemological forces that coalesced during the eighteenth century (often reflected in the novel and…
From Andrew's list on The best books about the Enlightenment and the world it created.
If you love Inventing Human Rights...
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