This shift was a psychological change, a new capacity of people to empathize across social boundaries.
The 18th century saw a profound moral transformation, through which human beings came to see themselves as autonomous, self-possessed creatures, and importantly, that other human beings were similarly autonomous creatures who deserved similar treatment.
Why did they, however imperfectly, dream of and aspire to create a world of universal equality? Given an 18th century world in which the subservience of Africans, women, the propertyless, and several more categories of persons was not only ubiquitous but also experienced as a reflection of nature itself, how could the idea of universal human rights, particularly those in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen become thinkable? After all, this was a revolution in ideas from those who directly benefited from the old world’s inequalities. Lynn Hunt tackles a breathtaking question in INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS: Harris, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley.
0 kommentar(er)
