About the book: 2023 / The idea of ​​human rights first arose and was formulated at the end of the 18th century in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. But why exactly then were new ethical standards of politics formed? What role did the abolition of torture and cruel punishment play in this process? And like the novels of J.-J. Did Rousseau, S. Richardson and L. Stern help expand the social boundaries of empathy? In answering these questions, Lynne Hunt reconstructs the turbulent history of human rights and shows how its vicissitudes affect our ability to protect those rights today. The author describes the beginning of the struggle for the idea of ​​universal human rights and analyzes the reasons why it failed during the rise of nationalism in the 19th century. In the final part of the book, Hunt shows how, after the global catastrophes of the 20th century, the greatest flowering of this idea came in 1948 in connection with the proclamation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then analyzes the situation of human rights in the modern world. Lynn Hunt - American historian, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.