Adina Heistein
Human Rights: Law, Politics, Theology
May 14th 2017
Final Paper
Professor Mirsky Human Rights throughout History as Told by Samuel Moyn and Lynn Hunt
Human rights is the notion that every human, regardless of gender, religion, or citizenship, is guaranteed the rights that are believed to belong to every person, justifiably. People may view human rights as different fundamental needs and rights guaranteed to every person, but everyone should be guaranteed human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights written in 1948. The evolution of human rights has been explored in two books, The Last Utopia and Inventing Human Rights. The Last Utopia by Samuel Moyn and
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Both Samuel Moyn’s and Lynn Hunt’s books focus on the way that human rights arose in history but draw from different ideas and drastically different time periods. While Hunt focuses on the time preceding World War II, Moyn chooses to focus on the time period he thinks human rights truly evolved into modern day human rights, in the 1970’s, when the Cold War was fully …show more content…
By linking the history of human rights to both Enlightenment individuality and the French Revolution, Hunt reinforces and furthers the understanding that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights grew out of Western Enlightenment tradition. Moyn, on the other hand, argues that human rights did NOT come about through the enlightenment while Hunt argues something on the contrary to this.
Inventing Human Rights is a book that examines human rights before the idea of human rights and the term human rights existed. In articulating her terms at the beginning of the book, Hunt argues that by using the twentieth-century term empathy, as opposed to the original eighteenth-century term sympathy, she "better captures the active will to identify with others". In her book, Hunt argues that empathy has been around for hundreds of years, just as a cultural idea, as exhibited with the theater interrupting