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The 18th-Century Body and the Origins of Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Lynn Hunt
Lynn Hunt*
Affiliation:
Department of Modern European History, UCLA
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Abstract

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Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault's contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here, one that focuses on how individual bodies came to be viewed as separate and inviolable, that is, as autonomous. The separateness and inviolability of bodies can be traced in the histories of bodily practices as different as portraiture and legal torture. After 1750, regular public exhibitions, themselves a new feature of the social landscape, showed increasing numbers of portraits in London and Paris. The proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original. At the same time, the tide turned against judicially sanctioned torture and cruel punishment. Long-held notions of sacrificial punishment and truth through pain withered under the pressure of new experiences of the body that in turn facilitated the emergence of new conceptions of rights of individuals.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2004 , pp. 41 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

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