Sociology

The most intriguing question that Lynn Hunt will help us answer in her book Inventing Human Rights is how the disorderly and tumultuous history of human rights shapes the perception and ability of the world in embracing the underlying principles of human rights. Arguably, the understanding of the world today is that human rights triumph over all other values, traditions, claims, cultures and communities with regard to the tenets that every human being has some inalienable rights by virtue of being a human. This paper seeks to examine the insignificance of torture in the expedition of justice across social boundaries, drawing the arguments of Lynn Hunt in her book Inventing Human Rights A History.

The contemporary society is engulfed in various unethical practices that have necessitated legal and social institutions to operate on the tenets human rights. Human rights acts as a moral transformational through which human beings can be treated in the light of self possessed creature thus underscoring that human beings at large are autonomous creatures and deserve a fair, ethical and humane treatment. The whole sphere of human rights has undergone a transformational shift emphasizing on the fact that human beings should be treated with dignity and thus it becomes new capacity for people to empathize across social boundaries. The development of Human rights activism has been constructed around the question of evidence, human dignity, and ethical justice.

Human rights movements fail to understand one primary element. As such, the basis of human rights in the world is trapped in the intellectual tradition of linear progressivism. This tend to hinder a clear understanding of the tinges inherent in the in the question of human rights. Inventing Human Rights provides detailed trend in the social understanding of human rights and thus, it presents the numerous setbacks and various contradictions as part of the legend of relentless human progress. These flaws in human rights movement are presented by Hunt to mark a significant addition to the current literatures that seek to distinctly drag the historical perspectives into the human rights discipline.

According to hunt, the impact of enlightenment ideas on the political as well as social expansions are traced with a keen focus on the French and American revolutions as well as the declarations they inspired. In her book, Hunt reminds us of the eminent contradictions and tension that have from history underlined ideas about human rights. For example, the irony in the declaration of rights to be universal did so by excluding slaves, women, religious minorities and those without property. As a result, these groups did not participate fully in the political process. With regard to this, Hunt underscores that while we should not forget that such glaring restrictions placed on rights by these men who universalized rights, we should effort to move closer to making the whole plan more integrating and inclusive of all people within the social boundary (Hunt, 200745-57).

Cases of men living in societies built on slavery, natural subservience and subordination demonstrates the lack of comprehensive equality which is a crucial factor to the history of human rights. Hunt contributes greatly to the subject of human rights by bringing a connection between the expansion of human rights and the changes in social attitudes.  For instance, Hunt postulates that the concept of imagined empathy, drawn from the Imagined Communities of Benedict Anderson, serves as the foundation of political and social transformation that has modernized the aspect of human rights. Evidently, the concept of integrity and empathetic selfhood has histories as those related to human rights (Hunt, 200730). Accordingly, learning to empathize should come along with the concerns of physical respect for human beings thus, leading to the outright rejection of judicial torture. This paved way fro the development of human rights.

Towards this conceptualization, Hunt fails to account that historically, torture had physical effects that impacted on the brain thus, and the new concept of political and social life resulted in the formation of human rights movement (Hunt, 200733). This claim makes one to regard some of Hunts argument to be far fetched. However, it appears to dip into the corridors of psychoanalysis which in itself is not a historical discipline. In addition, this book becomes Eurocentric. For example, Hunt limits the discussion of the inventing human rights to specifically the history of the western world. As such, the author lends credibility to the understanding of human rights as something that was invented in the west and exported to other worlds. This implies that human rights as a cross cultural processes too one sided a happening.

However, the arguments of history of human rights was influenced by the changes that resulted in the rejection of torture as basically, a mean of finding the truth as well as the spread of empathy over the centuries. Accordingly, to understand the origin of human rights, Hunt book becomes handy because it offers the limelight the intellectual and cultural appraisal which helps scholars in tracing the roots of human rights guided by the principle of rejecting torture as the sole mean of unraveling the truth. Evidently, Hunt demonstrates that this is true by showing how ideas of the human relationships formed the baseline for the spread of human rights across the world. This has been the source of the continued relevance of human rights in the contemporary world.

Fundamentally, sociologists are concerned with the motivation of the investing of human rights movements and given the 18th centaury world, the subservience of Africans, women and those without property experience a biased treatment. Perhaps, it is a consolation to the sociologist concern because it is an idea that may have led to the universal human rights particularly as pictured by Hunt in the American Declaration of Independence and French revolutions Declaration (Hunt, 200745-49). Somehow the motivating principle was to nurture and realized a dream that to create a world of universal equality.

According to Hunt, the deep moral transformation in the 18th centaury led human beings to begin seeing themselves as independent and self possessed creature who deserved dignified treatment irrespective of their social positions. In an epistolary approach, Hunt explains that people of all manners ranging from clergy to military officers wrote to Rousseau in a bid to express their feelings of a devoured fire (Hunt, 200736). As such, this was a clear evidence of a new capacity among people to identify with the problem of a dissimilarly situated human being. Accordingly, many people understood that servants, slaves, the rich and the poor, natives and foreigners shared a profound feeling and the capacity to suffer both psychological and physical pain as a community. Consequently, a foundation of addressing the unequal treatment of other began and developed with a common voice.

To recap, Hunt manages to convince historians of the need to look at the psychological changes within the minds of people in a society as a potential channel to historical change. Evidently, the human rights claim that evidence. She argues that the force of retrenchment which seeks new justifications for the exclusion of the less powerful is inadequate. The forces of advocating for human rights has opened the political space upon which the universality of human respect and dignity is eventually taking space in the international arena and human rights becomes an instrument of the United Nations systems. Today, Human rights raise a sociological alrm bell and have maintained respect for mankind irrespective of the social status or social boundaries.