Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Jane Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Animal Life ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Animal Representation ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter places nonhuman animals at the centre of the age of revolution, outlining the naturalistic and sympathetic perspectives on animal life underpinning emergent animal rights discourses. Firstly it shows how eighteenth-century natural history influenced a shift from symbolic to literal animal representation. Secondly it argues that David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s philosophies of sympathy each encouraged anthropomorphism in animal representation, Hume’s by blurring the distinction between rationality and animality, Smith’s by opening up the possibility of imaginative projection into nonhuman experiences. Thirdly, it traces the radicalization of the idea of natural rights, showing how the concept of human rights was locked in a complex and fraught relationship with that of animal rights. Human demands for rights entailed claims to a fully human rationality distinct from animality, but the concept of universal natural rights for man and woman was extended beyond the human.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-254
Author(s):  
Jane Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Political Tension ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site ◽  
Two Sides

Drawing together the threads of the previous chapters, these pages reflect on the way the entangled development of the concepts of human rights and animal rights made the human–animal border a site of political tension. During the eighteenth century people were exploring the similarities between human and nonhuman animals in new ways, encouraged by developments in natural history and the cultural spread of sympathy. The concept of animal rights was an almost inevitable (if uncertain) extension of the concept of human rights, and made the borderline between human and animal a site of great political tension. That animals are like humans, and that humans are (like) animals, were propositions brought together, two sides of the same coin, but what that might mean for human politics and for human–animal relations was debatable and debated, then as now. As we have seen, both the possibility that human–animal kinship could inspire greater kindness, and the danger that the animalization of human groups could be used to rationalize oppression, were realized during the period. The work concludes with a brief consideration of the legacy of eighteenth-century writing in contemporary animal representation, highlighting the continuing importance of storytelling to the creation of respect for nonhuman animals.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. D. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Representative System

The changing fortunes of democracy and of rights discourse in the present have provoked the concern that ‘History is not turning out as intended’. Such changing fortunes call for renewed attention to the ‘age of revolution’ and a reconsideration of its conventional historiography. Universalism must now be balanced against particularism. Paine helps that analysis, and also sheds light on the unexplained contradiction in recent historiography between a late eighteenth century dominated by natural rights and Enlightenment discourse, and an early nineteenth dominated by utilitarianism and socialism. The long-term trajectories of natural rights theory and republicanism, especially, now demand reconsideration. Paine’s age did not see a transition from particularist legal right to universal human rights, and into the twentieth century universalizing rights language seldom provided a stable intellectual foundation for proliferating republics. Merely pragmatic reinterpretations of Paine’s ‘representative system’ contribute to blighting the democratic potential of many republics.

Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Animal Representations ◽  
Racist Discourse ◽  
Social Subordination

This book argues that shifting attitudes to nonhuman animals in eighteenth-century Britain affected the emergence of radical political claims based on the concept of universal human rights. It examines a tension in 1790s radicalism between the anthropocentrism of the concept of the ‘rights of man’, and the challenge to human exceptionalism entailed by attempts to extend benevolent consideration to nonhuman animals. The development of a naturalistic and sympathetic literature of animal subjectivity is traced with particular attention to the innovatory representation of nonhuman animal perspectives within children’s literature. The study explores the complex relationship between animal representation and claims for human rights through an investigation of writing by and about four overlapping human groups—children, women, slaves, and the lower classes—whose social subordination was grounded in their cultural construction as less than fully human. Emancipatory movements of political reform, abolition, and feminism, and the animal representations produced within those movements, were affected by the varying forms of animalization applied to each oppressed group. A final chapter considers the legacy of 1790s animal rights discourses in the early-nineteenth-century campaign for anti-cruelty legislation. The book’s many literary animals include the ass, ambiguous emblem of sympathetic animal writing; the great ape or ‘orang-outang’, central to racist discourse; and the pig, adopted by 1790s radicals to signify their rebellion. Writers considered include Sterne, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Clare, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Hays, Mary Robinson, Equiano, Sancho, Cugoano, Clarkson, Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, John Oswald, Joseph Ritson, Thomas Erskine, and John Lawrence.

Perambulating Mice and the Confluence of Sympathy and Moral Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Shawna Lichtenwalner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth century was the locus of a burgeoning interest in animal rights. This essay examines the critical role that children’s literature had in the evolution of more consideration for animal welfare. The use of animals in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy Kilner helped create a form of animal subjectivity as a means of teaching children compassion through the creation of sympathy for nonhuman animals. By fostering compassion for the needs of so-called “dumb creatures” children could also be taught, by extension, to have more consideration for other people. In particular, Dorothy Kilner’s animal autobiography The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse offers a new way of viewing animals who are neither physical nor affectional slaves as worthy of both consideration and compassion.

1. Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Rainey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
International Protection ◽  
Essential Information ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World

Each Concentrate revision guide is packed with essential information, key cases, revision tips, exam Q&As, and more. Concentrates show you what to expect in a law exam, what examiners are looking for, and how to achieve extra marks. This chapter begins with an overview of human rights and how ideas about rights have changed over time, from the intellectual enlightenment of the eighteenth century that emphasised the connection between natural rights and dignity, to the rise of consequentialist philosophers in the nineteenth century who challenged natural rights and insisted on the promotion of a common good or welfare. It then considers the historical development of rights and the emergence of international protection of human rights in the twentieth century as a result of war and atrocity, focusing on the war crime trials and the formation of the United Nations after the Second World War. The chapter also looks at the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the creation of treaties as well as regional agreements, before concluding with an assessment of human rights today and categories of rights, along with human rights in the UK.

Natural history books in the library of Dr Richard Richardson

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edgington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Books

During the first decades of the eighteenth century the wealthy Yorkshire naturalist Richard Richardson acquired a large library, particularly strong in natural history, medicine and antiquarianism. Virtually all the natural history component was dispersed before the library was catalogued, so its contents have been unknown. Richardson's unpublished correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane and William Sherard contains many references to his books and shows that they and other leading naturalists were the source of most of them, by donation and purchase. Of about 700 books in natural history that he possessed, 425 have been identified; an Appendix lists 300 of the more significant titles. Comparison is made with other natural history libraries, and the eventual fate of Richardson's is discussed.

scholarly journals God, New Natural Law Theory, and Human Rights

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Christopher Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Full Theory ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Epistemological Dimension

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.

Dru Drury, his Illustrations of natural history (1770-82) and the European market for printed books

Quaerendo ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Noblett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
European Market ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
International Book

AbstractThis study attempts to show how the English entomologist, Dru Drury (1725-1804) exported his only published book, Illustrations of natural history, which appeared in three volumes between 1770 and 1782. Drury used three contacts on the European mainland: the Amsterdam bookseller, Jan Christian Sepp; the German botanist, Paul Dietrich Giseke and the Danish naturalist, Morten Thrane Brunnich. Drury's letters to these three men form the basis of the study. An examination of them reveal some of the problems encountered in the international book-trade in the eighteenth century (such as parcels going missing and the difficulties of payment) and show some of the formalities that had to be undertaken when exporting.

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