A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review

It has cost a heroic struggle to wrest this greatest of all human liberties from the grasp of despotism; and streams of human blood have been poured out before the object was attained. But for this very reason every son of the Reformation tramples upon the honor of the fathers, who does not assiduously and without retrenching, defend this palladium

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The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the leas

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History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that eight of the thirteen British colonies had official c

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