added by Jonathan Simcoe · updated 2y ago
A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review
The foundation for liberal democracy, which makes the protection of individual rights the basis for political society, was thereby established. A century later, in Great Britain — where the conception of rights was tightly bound to biblical teachings — the defeat of the international slave trade became a national priority. William Wilberforce, an
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
But this ignores the astonishing achievement of the Framers in Philadelphia. The American Declaration became the ultimate preamble to the Constitution, in that the entire structure of government was designed to protect the rights and freedoms it proclaimed. Moreover, both documents were fully embraced by the moral custodians of the revolution, the
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Having denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
The history of the struggle for freedom in the West teaches an inconvenient truth: that there is no coherent view of human personality stripped of the imago Dei. Britain’s former chief rabbi, the late Jonathan Sacks, explained that the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence were anything but self-evident. “They would have been u
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
If this is true, then the cause of human rights cannot prevail in an utterly materialistic culture. The sublime doctrine of human dignity emerged from the rugged soil of biblical religion — and nowhere else. If it is to be renewed, it must draw life from the waters of Sinai and Jerusalem.
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
Although Protestants could be as intolerant of dissent as their Catholic counterparts, the Reformation set the template for nearly every successful campaign for political and religious liberty in the West. The elevation of individual conscience galvanized the 17th-century revolution in natural rights, for example, embodied in the writings of Engli
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
In his opening address at the 1945 war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson accused Nazi leaders of assaulting “all those dignities and freedoms that we hold [as] natural and inalienable rights in every human being.” The horrific negation of those rights — by the agents of totalitarianism — threatened the fabric o
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago
The ancient Greeks, despite their belief in fate, regarded the individual citizen as possessing moral agency and as a vital participant in the city-state, or polis. Thus, the Greeks were the first to break ranks with the accepted model of government — the monarchy — and chart a path toward demokratia, government by consent. The idea of individual a
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Jonathan Simcoe added 8mo ago