Inventing Human Rights
A History

This book sets out to explain how the concept of human rights, i.e. rights owing simply to one's status as a human, rather than as a member of a particular political community, gained widespread currency. She traces the origins of human rights to the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment and trie......more

Mensen verschillen. Rechten niet.......more

Hunt begins by locating the rise of human rights with the rise of the novel. Eighteenth century literary culture encouraged readers to identify directly and intensely with those unlike themselves--learning to feel what was called sympathy then and is called empathy now for characters on the pages of......more

2.5 stars This wasn't very cohesive and it felt contradictory. At the end of the introduction, she said her argument was how epistolary novels and empathy helped further human rights. She only really talked about novels in the first chapter and then went off to talk about other things. It just felt l......more

Hunt‘s Buch behandelt weniger die „Erfindung“ der Menschenrechte als es sich hierbei zunächst um eine kurze (durchaus interessante) Begriffsgeschichte handelt, gefolgt von einzelnen Faktoren, die im Laufe der Zeit die sich stetig veränderte Deutung der universellen Menschenrechte eine Rolle gespielt......more