A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review

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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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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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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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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Into this maelstrom stepped Martin Luther, a theology professor at Witten­berg. In 1517, his posting of 95 grievances against the Catholic Church was only a hint of how the status of the individual was changing. Luther’s most revolutionary act was his defiance at the Diet of Worms, where he elevated the solitary believer — armed only with the Bible

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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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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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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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The Apology, as recorded by Plato, his student, is a bracing defense of the individual in search of truth:

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong. . . . I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I sh

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