Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History

I will focus mainly on in Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History is the seemingly implausible claim of how epistolary novels became the sole factor that helped ignite the spark of the human rights movement during the Enlightenment era. Although empathy is needed for one to support the cause of the human rights movement, it is highly doubtful that it rooted solely from the epistolary novels. Hunt’s point is easy to be refuted, as she claims something that is so tedious — how is it possible that the act of reading novels could have an impact so great; just by simply reading epistolary novels, people are able to possess the ability to be emphatic, in which supposedly non-existent and unheard of at that time, and able to close the enormous gap between social classes. And hence, it is safe to say that there is a relation between epistolary novel, empathy, and human rights contributing to the development of the rights of man in Hunt’s opinion. Nonetheless, claiming that the human rights movement in the Enlightenment era happened entirely due to the rise of epistolary novel looks like an overstretch and a little bit hard to believe. …show more content…
Hunt concerns herself with humans status in the social community, rather than in a political community, although over time it will spread towards the political realm as well. Hunt claims that human rights originated from the Enlightenment era that took place in the Eighteenth-Century; she claimed that the idea of human rights first arose at this point in time because there was a rudimentary change in which how people relate themselves to one another and in there is also a shift in how they thought — this new-found concept called empathy, as she asserts in the beginning of the