INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS

Have I really spent the day reading the Sunday Book Review in the New York Times? I am starting to realize that may be the case. One last one to take a look at: INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS. Considering the continuing tale of same-sex marriage in Indiana, I suggest checking out the review and the book.

Hunt, the Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a distinguished expert on 18th-century France, says that “human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone) and universal (applicable everywhere).” This conception of human rights, she explains, had its origins in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century. Although the English had issued a Bill of Rights in 1689, that document derived from the particularities of English law and English history and did not declare the equality, universality or naturalness of rights. It was left to Thomas Jefferson and the American Congress in 1776 to issue the first notable human rights proclamation. But it was the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 that had the greatest impact on Western thinking.

Not being particularly much of a Francophile (and reading Albert Camus's The Rebel gave me a lot of good reasons to think of the French Revolution as pretty much a failure of ideas), I disagree with the last sentence. For Hoosiers, we enshrined the essence of the Declaration of Independence in our state Bill of Rights.