I will be reviewing Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, in which Hunt focuses on the conceptualization of human rights and the paradox of self-evidence. Hunt introduces her perspective regarding novels as the fuel for a change in political ideas, “The austere Swiss natural law philosopher Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui insisted that liberty could only be proved by each man’s inner feelings: ‘Such proofs of feeling are above all objection and produce the most deep-seated conviction.’ Human rights are not just a doctrine formulated in documents; they rest on a disposition toward other people, a set of convictions about what people are like and how they know right and wrong in the secular world” (Hunt 27). Especially in the eighteenth century, novels were a way to escape from the everyday and dive into a character. It is only natural, then, that the reader begins to project themselves onto the …show more content…
For human rights to become self-evident, ordinary people had to have new understandings that came from new kinds of feelings” (Hunt 34). Our morals are rooted in learned behaviors and is not biologically innate (to differentiate from evolutionary leanings for certain behaviors). Fundamental in shaping these cultural definitions or expectations for personal and psychological boundaries (empathy, autonomy, behavioral expectations) that emit from within our individual selves, the philosophers as well as some of their influential novels helped propel citizens to think beyond and eventually challenge the blatant commonly accepted inequalities in