Using a wide range of artistic, iconographic, literary and historical sources, Lynn Hunt undertakes a Freudian-influenced-analysis of the French Revolution. The depostion of France's monarchy, allegations of Marie-Antoinette's sexual debauchery and incest with her son, followed by the execution of Louis XVI and later his wife, were part of an unfolding revolutionary family drama, in which the positions of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters were being realigned according to the new standards of rationalism, universalism, and especially, fraternity. Lynn Hunt investigates how the narratives...

How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.

Across the humanities and the social sciences, disciplinary boundaries have come into question as scholars have acknowledged their common preoccupations with cultural phenomena ranging from rituals and ceremonies to texts and discourse. Literary critics, for example, have turned to history for a deepening of their notion of cultural products; some of them now read historical documents in the same way that they previously read "great" texts. Anthropologists have turned to the history of their own discipline in order to better understand the ways in which disciplinary authority was constructed....