A Nation Like No Other Read Online Free PDF Page B

conflict-ridden religious life, encouraging the Founders to believe that a country founded on liberty could not only survive, but thrive.

NATURAL LAW AND THE NATURAL RIGHTS OF MAN
    Aside from its religious influences, the Declaration was impacted by European thinking on the issue of liberty. The document confirmed natural rights stemming from the identification of man as an inherently sovereign and dignified being—a proposition the Founders confirmed through both reason and experience.
    These ideas had developed over centuries. Drawing on Greek classical thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians identified man’s ability to reason and act autonomously as evidence of his personal sovereignty. Renaissance thinkers later stressed man’s self-awareness (Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”) as proof of personal sovereignty, which could be expressed outwardly in violence or benevolence, in horror or genius. Great individual accomplishments in arts and sciences reinforced this notion—from Da Vinci to Shakespeare, from Galileo to Newton, individuals demonstrated the power to remake the world around them.
    Other thinkers developed a parallel belief in the inviolate dignity of man. Citing Judeo-Christian texts, medieval scholars identified the inherent dignity of man as a gift from God. Because the universality of God’s gift required the same responsibility of everyone, this reasoning implied all men were equal in God’s eyes—a revolutionary doctrine that inspired challenges to the authority of Church prelates and state officials alike.
    Drawing on these currents, the English philosopher John Locke devised theories that would strongly influence America’s Founders. Locke
argued against the ideas of fellow Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who insisted it was man’s natural instinct to reject the dignity of his fellow man. This instinct, Hobbes argued, reduced life to a brutish, anarchic “state of nature” that can only be avoided by ceding individual rights to an immensely powerful central authority—a so-called “Leviathan.” For Locke, however, individuals in the “state of nature” were sovereign and equal under God, and therefore dignified. Locke observes:
    People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another. It is evident that all human beings—as creatures belonging to the same species and rank and born indiscriminately with all the same natural advantages and faculties—are equal amongst themselves. They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.
    Locke believed man’s inherent reason forestalled the onset of a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” yet he acknowledged that reason, by leaving man free to do good or ill, made an individual’s “life, liberty, and property” insecure. To correct for that insecurity, individuals can willingly band together to create a society that secures rights for mutual benefit.
    According to Locke’s doctrine of consent, the transfer of power from individuals to a state or society is conditional and incomplete. Man’s natural freedom, and his right to life and liberty, are God-given and cannot be ceded even willingly because they are not his to give—in other words, these rights are “unalienable.” Locke argued,
    The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his
rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by