Skip to main content
Home

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Series
  • People
  • Depts & Colleges
  • Open Education

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Series
  • People
  • Depts & Colleges
  • Open Education

Writing Rights in 1789

Series
Voltaire Foundation
Video Embed
Keith M Baker, professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University, explains a Digital Humanities project mapping the debates on the constituent articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
What happened to rights in 1789? I plan to present in this lecture some results of a collaborative research project exploring this question. Digital Humanities has done remarkable work to reveal the diffusion of texts, the circulation of letters, and the distribution of writers across enlightened Europe. In this regard, its model has tended toward the sociological and dispersive. What might be done, though, with a more political and concentrated approach that would try to digitize decisions and visualize moments of collective choice? What, more specifically, might we learn about the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that portal to the modern political world? Methods of digital humanities aside, there are also good historiographical reasons for looking again at the week of debates in which the National Assembly fixed on that document. The project I will discuss was provoked most immediately by Jonathan Israel's claims that the principles of the French Revolution, particularly as expressed in August 1789 in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, represented a victory for the group of intellectuals he gathers together under the banner of a Radical Enlightenment deriving its ideas and arguments ultimately from materialist philosophy. But it bears also on issues raised by new histories of human rights, for which the character of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen must be crucial for the question of continuity or rupture in the practice of rights talk.

More in this series

View Series
Voltaire Foundation

Methusela and the unity of mankind: late Renaissance and early Enlightenment conceptions of time

Martin van Gelderen delivers a talk for the Besterman Lecture 2018
Previous
Voltaire Foundation

Inaugural George Rousseau Lecture - Liberty as equality: Rousseau and Roman constitutionalism

Dan Edelstein from Stanford University gives the Inaugural George Rousseau Lecture, the convenor is Avi Lifschitz, Magdalen College.
Next
Transcript Available

Episode Information

Series
Voltaire Foundation
People
Keith M Baker
Keywords
France
revolution
human rights
1789
enlightenment
debates
national assembly
article 10
digital humanities
visualisation
continuity
rupture
jonathan israel
besterman lecture
voltaire foundation
Department: Voltaire Foundation
Date Added: 23/11/2018
Duration: 00:56:19

Subscribe

Apple Podcast Video Apple Podcast Audio Video RSS Feed

Download

Download Video Download Transcript

Footer

  • About
  • Accessibility
  • Contribute
  • Copyright
  • Contact
  • Privacy
'Oxford Podcasts' Twitter Account @oxfordpodcasts | MediaPub Publishing Portal for Oxford Podcast Contributors | Upcoming Talks in Oxford | © 2011-2022 The University of Oxford