Why did millions of individuals in the marketplace of ideas, uncoordinated by any master plan or any manual or instruction booklet, simultaneously embrace classical liberalism and human rights? FULL ARTICLE by Jeff Riggenbach
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/12392/what-caused-liberty-to-triumph/
What Caused Liberty to Triumph?
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Hunt: “..what made people in the 18th century think that universal human rights were self-evident: an implication that they must always exist, when they hadn’t been considered self-evident previously?”
Hunt’s answer is science. But historians of science credit Christianity’s emphasis on reason for the rise of science. At the same time, the fires of the Reformation forged modern thinking on liberty. As has been pointed out on this site many times, Catholic and Protestant writers of the 15th and 16th centuries discovered the limits of state power in natural law, which meant God’s law.
The 18th century is much too late to attempt to discover the origins of liberty. The ideas existed in the 16th century, but the first state to implement those ideas was the Dutch Republic. The thirst for freedom in France and England came from envy of Dutch freedom, just as the rise of mercantile writings was in response to Dutch prosperity.
What an encouraging post!
With libertarian / anarcho capitalist ideas being so sensible and the dissemination of ideas so easy these days (as this post demonstrates)…
At the same time the fields have been tilled, planted, and fertilized (hmm, maybe that’s not such a good way to put it) by books by Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein & such…
And with a crisis of the old economic / state paradigms showing how they don’t work…
Perhaps we are approaching the cusp of our ideas becoming “self-evident”
Nice yar……………………
What i write i could not found.I am Speech less.
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Sarah Jones
Travel Saver
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