Moral imperialism Book

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 tries to make the argument that it emerged at this point in time because there was a fundamental change in how ordinary individuals related to one another and in how they thought -- namely they developed empathy: "I am trying to refocus attention on what goes on within individual minds...Attention has been focused on the social and cultural contexts, not on the way individual minds understand and reshape that context. I believe that social and political change -- in this case, human rights -- comes about because many individuals had similar experiences, not because they inhabited the same social context but because through their interactions with each other and with their reading and viewing, they actually created a new social context...For human rights to become self-evident, ordinary people have to have new understandings that came from new kinds of feelings" (34).

To make this argument, she opens by endeavoring to show how a new genre -- the epistolary novel -- changed the way in which Westerners (specifically British, French, and American) apprehended the emotions of others. While she does not try to claim that novels alone led to empathy, she does not identify any other contributing factors. However, the main problem is that author fails to present sufficient evidence at multiple levels that the epistolary novel had this impact and if so how exactly this new concept of empathy became entangled with political thought. For example, she states at one point, "The capacity for empathy is universal because it is rooted in the biology of the brain" (39). So if this is the case, it would suggest that human beings long before the 18th century demonstrated empathy. Thus, she would need to demonstrate a qualitative difference, as well as a quantitative one, in how empathy was expressed in the 18th century as opposed to other centuries. But she provides little or no background on earlier expressions of empathy. So one might say, perhaps she simply means a quantitative difference in its expression in the public sphere. So while she provides examples of the reading public's reactions to epistolary novels (primarily from elites), she provides her reader with no real evidence as to how widespread this phenomenon was. Is it in fact changing the "ordinary individuals" perception of the world? And who she includes in the category "ordinary" is never specified. These oversights may simply result from the book's length. At a mere 214 pages (not counting appendices or notes), there is just not sufficient space to document such a sweeping change in the history of emotion.

The second chapter of the book focuses on changed attitudes toward the use of state torture and its implication for the invention of human rights. She notes that in Europe and the United States in the 18th century, a fairly rapid reduction in the use of torture techniques occurred. She links this development to 3 phenomena: 1) increased empathy 2) new emphasis on the integrity of the body 3) the rise of secularism stripped torture of its religious moorings, thus changing its meanings for the public. In making this argument, what she fails to problematize is the reemergence of torture as a viable interrogation technique since the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. If a reduction in the use of torture techniques is key for human rights gaining widespread currency, then what impact does its reemergence have on the currency of human rights in the post-9/11 world? The war on terror was often framed as a human rights issue and yet initially the United States utilized torture as a key element in that war. Water boarding as practiced by the CIA, events at Abu Ghraib, not to mention the detention of possible terrorists without recourse to due process at Guantanamo Bay all attest to this fact. So perhaps the relation between torture and the language of human rights is more complicated than the author suggests, given that sometimes that language becomes weaponized against real or imagined enemies. It becomes a means of creating "the other".

There is no doubt that the author raises some important questions about how the language of human rights gained acceptance and about how changes in how we perceive others and the world around us impacts our understanding of human rights. That said, the book skips over vast periods of time -- dedicating a mere 30-some-odd pages to the period following the 1948 UN declaration. Moreover, Hunt presents a history of human rights that assumes a unilateral diffusion of human rights from the global North to the global South. In short, she never considers the many grassroots movements in Asia and South America who appropriated the language of human rights in the 1970s and 1980s in order to move their local struggles onto the international stage and how this appropriation transformed the international debate on human rights.