Self-Evident Truths?: Human Rights and the Enlightenment

The keywords of the Enlightenment―freedom, tolerance, rights, equality―are today heard everywhere, and they are used to endorse a wide range of positions, some of which are in perfect contradiction. While Orwell's 1984 claims that there is one phrase in the English language that resists translation into Newspeak, namely the opening lines of that key Enlightenment text, the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...', we also find the Wall Street Journal saying of the Iraq War that the US was ‘fighting for the very notion of the Enlightenment'. It seems we are no longer sure whether these truths are self-evident nor quite what they might mean today.

Based on the critically acclaimed Oxford Amnesty Lectures series, this book brings together a number of major international figures to debate the history of freedom, tolerance, equality, and to explore the complex legacy of the Enlightenment for human rights. The lectures are published here with responses from other leading figures in the field.

Kate E. Tunstall is University Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College. She is Programme Director of Oxford's Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, a Director of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and she co-authored and co-presented (with Caroline Warman) a series of BBC radio programmes on Diderot.

KATE E. TUNSTALL is Associate Professor of French in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. Her research interests are mostly in eighteenth-century and Enlightenment writing, from philosophy to aesthetics. She is author of Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (Bloomsbury, 2011), editor of Self-Evident Truths?: Human Rights and the Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2012), and co-editor of Diderot and Rousseau: networks of Enlightenment (SVEC, 2011), Pre-Histories and Afterlives: Studies in Critical Method (Legenda, 2008), Displacement, Asylum, Migration (OUP, 2006).