Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T16:06:02.251Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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

References

Bien, David D. (1960) The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Breen, T. H. (1993) ‘The Meaning of “Likeness”: Portrait-Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society’, in Miles, , ed. (1993) pp. 37–60.Google Scholar
Cockburn, J. S. (1994) ‘Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment’, Law and History Review, 12: 155–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elias, Norbert (1978) The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen Books (original German edition 1939).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1980) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1985) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1988) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M. (1991) A History of American Law. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Johnson, James H. (1995) Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: SAGE Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langbein, John H. (1976) Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McCloy, Shelby T. (1957) The Humanitarian Movement in Eighteenth-Century France. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
McGowen, Randall (1987) ‘The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Modern History, 59: 651–679.Google Scholar
Maestro, Marcello (1973) Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Maza, Sarah (1993) Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France. Berkeley: SAGE Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miles, Ellen G., ed. (1993) The Portrait in Eighteenth Century America. Newark: University of Delawar Press.Google Scholar
Mowery Andrews, Richard (1994) Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735-1789, vol. 1: The System of Criminal Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pardailhé-Galabrun, Annik (1991) The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris, trans. Jocelyn Phelps. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Peters, Edward (1985) Torture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Radzinowicz, Leon (1948) A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, 4 vols. London: Stevens & Sons.Google Scholar
Ravel, Jeffrey S. (1999) The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenwein, Barbara H. (2002) ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107: 821–845.Google ScholarPubMed
Ruff, Julius R. (1984) Crime, Justice and Public Order in Old Regime France: The Sénéchaussées of Libourne and Bazas, 1696-1789. London.Google Scholar
Sawicki, Jana (1996) ‘Feminism, Foucault, and “Subjects” of Power and Freedom’, in Heckman, Susan J., ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Shackelford, George T. M. and Tavener Holmes, Mary (1986) A Magic Mirror: The Portrait in France, 1700-1900. Houston: Museum of the Fine Arts.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Gilbert and Markoff, John (1998) Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Silverman, Lisa (2001) Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spierenburg, Pieter (1984) The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar