Lynn Hunt > Quotes

“GREAT THINGS sometimes come from rewriting under pressure.”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“Human rights are difficult to pin down because their definition, indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“It may not be the first line of defense of democratic societies, but it is actually quite near the front because an understanding of history heightens our ability to pierce through the fogs of willful misinformation that constitute lying.”
― Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters

“Democratization of national history went hand in hand with democratization of the university. The experiences of workers, slaves, indigenous peoples, women, and minorities could no longer be ignored.”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“Historians were slow to take up globalization as a source of interest. They had their own reasons for ignoring it, chief among them the straitjacket of nation-centered history writing. The fate of a textbook commissioned in 1949 by UNESCO for fourteen-year-old French students is particularly revealing of the pressures of national and nationalist history. UNESCO wanted to encourage “international comprehension” by providing an example of a more capacious national history, one that would show how much every nation, in this case France, owed to other peoples. Officials hoped that this example would encourage other countries to follow suit. The authors, Lucien Febvre, leader of the Annales school, and François Crouzet, a noted French specialist on British economic history, embraced their mission with enthusiasm and produced a model history of the global influences on life in France. Look at the people around you, they suggested. Are they one race? Hardly: one look would convince anyone that the “French” are a mixture of peoples, including Arabs and Africans. Look at the plants in the local park, they continued. The most “French” of trees came from Asia: the plane tree arrived in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, and the chestnut in the early seventeenth. Similarly, many of the most “classic” French foods originated elsewhere: green beans, potatoes, and tomatoes in the New World; citrus in the Far East; and so on. In short, much of the impact of the world on France was already well known sixty years ago. What happened? Febvre and Crouzet’s book was published for the first time in 2012, its original publication apparently having been blocked by those who disliked its de-emphasis on the nation and Europe.5”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“On July 12, 1789, the young journalist Camille Desmoulins jumped onto a café table in the Palais Royal in Paris and exhorted his listeners to take up arms to defend freedom. In this way, it might be said that coffee led eventually to revolution.26”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“Globalization, even if its nature and timing are still very much up for debate, has the salutary effect of challenging our most basic assumptions about space and time and therefore about society. The functioning of society depends on the regulation of space and time.”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“Reading Rousseasu's Julie opened up its readers to a new form of empathy. Although Rousseau gave currency to the term “rights of man,” human rights are hardly the main subject of his novel, which revolves around passion, love, and virtue. Nevertheless, Julie encouraged a highly charged identification with the characters and in so doing enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines. Eighteenth-century readers, like people before them, empathized with those close to them and with those most obviously like them—their immediate families, their relatives, the people of their parish, in general their customary social equals. But eighteenth-century people had to learn to empathize across more broadly defined boundaries. Alexis de Tocqueville recounts a story told by Voltaire’s secretary about Madame Duchâtelet, who did not hesitate to undress in front of her servants, “not considering it a proven fact that valets were men.” Human rights could only make sense when valets were viewed as men too.³

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The ability to identify across social lines might have been acquired in any number of ways, and I do not pretend that novel reading was the only one. Still, novel reading seems especially pertinent, in part because the heyday of one particular kind of novel—the epistolary novel—coincides chronologically with the birth of human rights. The epistolary novel surged as a genre between the 1760s and 1780s and then rather mysteriously died out in the 1790s. Novels of all sorts had been published before, but they took off as a genre in the eighteenth century, especially after 1740, the date of publication of Richardson’s Pamela. In France, 8 new novels were published in 1701, 52 in 1750, and 112 in 1789. In Britain, the number of new novels increased sixfold between the first decade of the eighteenth century and the 1760s: about 30 new novels appeared every year in the 1770s, 40 per year in the 1780s, and 70 per year in the 1790s. In addition, more people could read, and novels now featured ordinary people as central characters facing the everyday problems of love, marriage, and getting ahead in the world.”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“In contrast to Marxism, with its emphasis on class struggle between owners and workers, modernization traces conflict to the disparity between modernizing forces and traditional groups who are left behind or resist incorporation into the modern world.”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“وقد نص الإعلان الفرنسي صراحة على أن: «الجهل والإهمال وتجاهل حقوق الإنسان هي وحدها أسباب شقاء المجتمع وفساد الحكومات. وفي هذا الصدد لم يختلف عنهما كثيرا «الإعلان العالمي لحقوق الإنسان الذي صيغ في عام ١٩٤٨ . لا شك في أن الإعلان الذي أصدرته الأمم المتحدة حمل نبرة أكثر قانونية عندما نص على أنه: «لما كان الإقرار بما لجميع أعضاء الأسرة البشرية من كرامة أصيلة فيهم، ومن حقوق متساوية وثابتة، يشكل أساس الحرية والعدل والسلام في العالم”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

“Despite the continuing popularity of biographies of famous people and books about major wars, history is in crisis and not just one of university budgets.”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“In the process of retrieval, restoration, and debate, a group, a nation, or a world gains a stronger footing.”
― Lynn Hunt

“As currently understood in neuroscience, emotions are singularly pivotal. Neurologists Hanna and Antonio Damasio, for example, demonstrated in their studies of neurological damage that the emotions are essential elements in reasoning and decision-making. People who lose the ability to feel specific emotions as a result of strokes, head injuries, or tumors also lose the ability to make certain kinds of rational decisions. Thus reason or rationality is not the categorical opposite of emotion or feeling; reason depends on emotion for its functioning.”
― Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era

“لكن حدثت هناك طفرة مفاجئة في تطور هذه الممارسات في النصف الثاني من القرن الثامن عشر؛ صارت سلطة الآباء المطلقة على أبنائهم موضع تساؤل، وبدأت جموع الناس تشاهد العروض المسرحية أو تنصت إلى الموسيقى في هدوء، نافس فن تصوير الأشخاص وتصوير مشاهد الحياة اليومية هيمنة اللوحات الزيتية التي تتناول الأساطير والتاريخ التابعة للرسم الأكاديمي، وانتشرت الروايات والصحف، مما أتاح وصول قصص الحياة العادية إلى أيدي قاعدة كبيرة من الجموع، وبدأ الناس يستهجنون كلا من التعذيب الذي كان جزءًا من العملية القضائية، وأشكال العقاب البدني الأكثر تطرفا. كل هذه التغيرات أسهمت في تعزيز الإحساس بالانفصال وامتلاك كل فرد لجسده، بالإضافة إلى إمكانية التعاطف مع الآخرين”
― Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History