From their appearance in the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time, when they have become ubiquitous in national political discourses, Human Rights were the target of countless controversies about their definition. In general, these debates ended up by returning to the conception, present at their emergence, of being such evident rights in themselves with no need to be justify them, beyond the conviction of men about their truth. The belief in their self-evident nature, and in their basic features (equality, naturalness, and universality) has its intellectual basis in the notion of the moral autonomy of individuals, dear to the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, this study intends to show that, along with the transformations in thought, the emergence of the idea of Human Rights evolved also from two subtle changes in the notions of body and identity: the enlarging of the idea of the individuality of the body, which made each man the holder of rights about himself; and the possibility of there being an imagined empathy between psyches, which, although distinct, are perceived as a part of the same humanity. Proposing a pscychocultural model for the historical study of the emergence of Human Rights, this essay analyzes how a literary genre, the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century, could have contributed to the formation of these rights. By promoting a passionate involvement of the readers in the fate of the characters, this type of reading furnished the emotional and psychological processes necessary to the rise of Human Rights and the conviction of their self-evidence.
Human rights; Literature; romance