The Invention of Human Rights

Human rights weren't discovered, they were invented through empathy. Lynn Hunt shows

that rights emerged when Europeans learned to feel for others through novels and revolution,

not from some eternal truth. But here's the twist: those same universal rights excluded

women and enslaved people from day one. The entire framework is built on European

Enlightenment ideas of the rational individual, which is why it struggles with corporate

power, climate collapse, and non-Western perspectives. Critics like Mutua

call it the Savage-Victim-Savior narrative, where the West always plays hero. Even feminist and

environmental movements had to reconstruct human rights from scratch because the original design