Chapter 1.0. The Enlightenment and Human Rights: Introduction
This chapter examines the emergence of the idea of “human rights” and its connections with the American and French Revolutions by drawing on Lynn Hunt’s book, Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2007). She traces the origins of the idea of universal human rights and argues that it was linked to major shifts in views of human nature, the body, and the “autonomous” individual person. The new attitudes that developed made the legitimacy of government dependent on the protection of rights, while making ordinary people and their well-being the basis for morality.
This introduction begins with two short sections that examine early debates about human rights while tackling the intriguing problem of why new claims for human rights were said to be “self-evident” (Hunt, pp. 15-22).
“We hold these truths to be self-evident”
Thirteen years after Thomas Jefferson had penned the famous line that claimed that certain “truths” were “self-evident,” he was in Paris when the French began to think about drawing up a statement of their rights. In January 1789, several months before the French Revolution began with the attack on the Bastille prison, Jefferson’s friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, veteran of the War of American Independence, drafted a French declaration, most likely with Jefferson’s help. When the Bastille fell on July 14, and the French Revolution began in earnest, the demand for an official declaration gathered momentum. After much debate, on August 27, the new National Assembly adopted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” which contained seventeen articles.
The document was stunning in its sweep and simplicity. Never once mentioning king, nobility, or church, it declared the “natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man” to be the foundation of any and all government. It assigned sovereignty to the nation, not the king, and pronounced everyone equal before the law. More striking than any particular guarantee, however, was the universality of the claims made. References to “men,” “man,” “every man,” “all men,” “all citizens,” “each citizen,” “society,” and “every society” dwarfed the single reference to the French people.
Partly because of these assertive and very broad statements of freedom, the publication of the declaration immediately galvanized worldwide opinion on the subject of rights, both for and against. In a sermon given in London on November 4, 1789, Richard Price, friend of Benjamin Franklin and frequent critic of the English government, waxed lyrical on the new rights of man. “I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it.”
Outraged by Price’s naive enthusiasm for the “metaphysical abstractions” of the French, the well-known essayist and member of Parliament Edmund Burke dashed off a furious response. His pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), gained instant recognition as the founding text of conservatism. “We are not the converts of Rousseau,” Burke thundered. “We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man.”
Price and Burke had agreed about the American Revolution; they both supported it. But the French Revolution, which overturned the government of a country whose population (28 million) was three times the size of Britain’s (10 million) and seven times that of the new United States (4 million), upped the ante enormously. Battle lines soon formed: was it the dawn of a new era of freedom based on reason or the beginning of a relentless descent into anarchy and violence?
For nearly two centuries, despite the controversy provoked by the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen incarnated the promise of universal human rights. In 1948, when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1 read, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” In 1789, Article I of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had already proclaimed, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The echo between the two documents is unmistakable.
Moreover, in contrast to the French Declaration, which was effectively France’s new “bill of rights,” the Declaration of Independence had no constitutional standing. Neither a law nor part of the U.S. Constitution, it simply declared intentions. Fifteen years passed before the states finally ratified a very different Bill of Rights in 1791, which compared to the French Declaration of Rights protected liberties in a much more cautious, “negative” way, i.e., by limiting what the federal government could do, rather than directly asserting what people’s rights were.
Yet those who so confidently declared rights to be universal in the late eighteenth century turned out to have something much less all-inclusive in mind. We are not surprised that they considered children, the insane, the imprisoned, or foreigners to be incapable or unworthy of full participation in the political process, for so do we. But they also excluded those without property, slaves, free blacks, in some cases religious minorities, and always and everywhere, women. In recent years, these limitations on “all men” have drawn much commentary, and some scholars have even questioned whether the declarations had any real emancipatory meaning. The founders, framers, and declarers have been judged elitist, racist, and misogynist for their inability to consider everyone truly equal in rights.
We should not forget the restrictions placed on rights by eighteenth-century men, but to stop there, patting ourselves on the back for our own comparative “advancement,” is to miss the point. How did these men, living in societies built on slavery, subordination, and seemingly natural subservience, ever come to imagine men not at all like them and, in some cases, women too, as equals? How did equality of rights become a “self evident” truth in such unlikely places? It is astounding that men such as Jefferson, a slaveowner, and Lafayette, an aristocrat, could speak as they did of the self-evident, inalienable rights of all men. If we could understand how this came to pass, we would understand better what human rights mean to us today.
The Paradox of Self-Evidence
Despite their differences in language, the two eighteenth-century declarations both rested on a claim of self-evidence. This claim of self-evidence, crucial to human rights even now, gives rise to a paradox: if equality of rights is so self evident, then why did this assertion have to made and why was it only made in specific times and places? How can human rights be universal if they are not universally recognized? And how do we account for the sudden crystallization of human rights claims at the end of the eighteenth century?
Human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be: natural (inherent in human beings); equal (the same for everyone); and universal (applicable everywhere). For rights to be human rights, all humans everywhere in the world must possess them equally and only because of their status as human beings. In many ways, we are grappling still with the implications of the demand for equality and universality of rights. At what age does someone have the right to full political participation? Do immigrants–non-citizens–share in rights, and which ones?
Yet even naturalness, equality, and universality are not quite enough. Human rights only become meaningful when they gain a fourth quality: political content. They are not the rights of humans in a state of nature; they are the rights of humans in society. They are not just human rights as opposed to divine rights, or human rights as opposed to animal rights; they are the rights of humans vis-a-vis each other. They are therefore rights guaranteed in the secular political world (even if they are called “sacred”), and they are rights that require active participation from those who hold them. The equality, universality, and naturalness of rights gained direct political expression for the first time in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789.
While the English Bill of Rights of 1689 referred to the “ancient rights and liberties” established by English law and deriving from English history, it did not declare the equality, universality, or naturalness of rights. In contrast, the Declaration of Independence insisted that “all men are created equal,” and that all of them possess “unalienable rights.” Similarly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen proclaimed that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Not French men, not white men, not Catholics, but “men,” which then as now means not just males but also persons, that is, members of the human race.
In other words, sometime between 1689 and 1776 rights that had been viewed most often as the rights of a particular people–freeborn English men, for example–were transformed into human rights, universal natural rights, what the French called les droits de l’homme or “the rights of man.”