5 Week 02

I’ve just finished reading through your responses to the chapters we read from Lynn Hunt’s work, Inventing Human Rights (2007). Before commenting on the substance of your posts, I want to make a few comments about the more formal aspects of your writing.

Please make sure to proofread before you publish. I don’t deduct points for spelling and grammar so long as a post is legible. However, if there are numerous spelling and / or grammatical errors, you will receive partial credit. Sometimes posts appear in wingdings. This happens when students use a web-based platform (like google docs) to compose their post and accidentally copy html coding when transferring the content to WordPress. To prevent this from happening, I recommend writing and editing in Microsoft Word. Or, you can review your post in WordPress using the text editor (above) and remove any html coding that appears (HTML coding is everything that appears in brackets <> ). Be sure everything is written in your own words, and any paraphrased text includes a citation. Finally, the only category assigned to your post is the assignment for that week. For example, this week you should have tagged your post with the category on the right: “assignment 01.”

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As many of you noted in your responses this week, Lynn Hunt (2007) is interested in examining the political, as well as what she refers to as the social and cultural practices, that accompanied the emergence of discourses on human rights. What is emerging, she argues, is nothing short of a new way of understanding human relations. Returning to works by Jefferson, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke and others, Hunt notes the precursors to human rights: discourses on “natural rights” and “the rights of man.” But related to these discourses, she underlines an increasing sense of autonomy and empathy that was developing in Western Europe and North America during this period. Pointing to the work of J. B. Schneedwind, she considers how moral autonomy is treated during this time as a capacity developing in the lives of those capable of participating in the new forms of government available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As we discussed at length in our discussion last night, who was viewed as “capable” and on what terms is a question that, for Hunt, is secondary to the project of considering what prompted this shift towards expressing the universal qualities of mankind.

Greater awareness of the distinctions between individual persons begins to take shape at the same time that there was an emerging sense of the qualities that bind all (property owning / white) men together. In the declarations Hunt examines, there is evidence of mankind’s demonstrable capacity to behave rationally, evidence that authorizes their creation and exercise of a new social contract. Different from how social relations were organized prior to this period, this focus on relations, that are defined in terms of the capacity for rational thought rather than by god the sovereign, becomes the foundation for a new form of governance. Prior to this, people looked to the sovereign power (god’s representative on earth) to explain life. Along with an evolving understanding of the rights of men, there was during this period an emerging sense of “rationality,” a way of living in the world that, whether addressed explicitly or not, was often joined to race, class, gender, and sexuality, as a justification for those who were enfranchised and disenfranchised.

In chapter three, Hunt points to some of the disagreements among liberal political theorists during this period. Different arrangements of “natural rights” allow us to think critically about the way liberal civil society was organized. Writing in 1625, Hugo Grotius, for example, said natural rights were connected to life, the body, freedom and honor (2007:118). But, Hunt stresses, John Locke defined natural rights in terms that stressed a natural right to property, and, therefore, whether intentionally or not, engineered rights in terms that did not challenge slavery. As we move forward, we will think more on how the connection of rights to property underlines how participation in governance is unfolding during this period.

Due Sunday, February 5th, by midnight. Word count: 400 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. If you paraphrase, make sure to include the proper citation.

1. Write an introductory post that tells the class who you are and about your interest in this class.

2. Then, in about a page, reflect on the following: In the introduction to her book, Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt (2007) draws our attention to some of the legal documents that were precursors to the Universal Declaration for Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Choose one of these works and begin to contextualize it in relationship to the framework for human rights that exists today.