HKB
4 passages · search this phrase →
Often appears with: slavery and bondage · rights and liberties · unchecked magistrates · tyranny and despotism · the nature and attributes of God · state of war continued · sparta and slavery · roman empire · public officers as passive agents · natural liberty · majority control over law · king’s veto
Usually: argument (4) · censure (3) · injustice endured (1) · detachment (1) · indignation (1)
“Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow creature, whose very station sinks him NECESSARILY below the meanest of his subjects!” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · insight
“The authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.” Alexis de Tocqueville, American Institutions and Their Influence · insight
“Men do not change from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name:” Thomas Paine, Common Sense · insight
Paine argues that even an agreement would still leave the King’s negative over colonial law, making America effectively enslaved, and could be used to suppress colonial growth through craft rather than force.
But admitting that matters were now made up, what would be the event? I answer, the ruin of the continent. And that for several reasons. First. The powers of governing still remaining in the hands of the king, he will have a negative over the whole legislation of this continent. And as he hath shewn himself such an inveterate enemy to liberty, and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power; is he, or is he not, a …
Locke defines natural liberty as freedom from superior power on earth, explains civil freedom as life under common laws by consent, and argues slavery is an ongoing war between conqueror and captive.
OF SLAVERY. Sect. 22. 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 consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legisl…
She rejects Rousseau’s celebration of “barbarism” and contrasts it with Roman and Spartan examples, then condemns kingship and uncontrolled power as inevitably corrupting and harmful to morality and social liberty.
Rousseau exerts himself to prove, that all WAS right originally: a crowd of authors that all IS now right: and I, that all WILL BE right. But, true to his first position, next to a state of nature, Rousseau celebrates barbarism, and, apostrophizing the shade of Fabricius, he forgets that, in conquering the world, the Romans never dreamed of establishing their own liberty on a firm basis, or of extending the reign of…
Tocqueville distinguishes tyranny from arbitrary power and argues that the majority’s control over both lawmaking and execution enables magistrates to act with arbitrary authority, treating public officers as servants whose duties are undefined.
be exercised for the good of the community at large, in which case it is not tyrannical. Tyranny usually employs arbitrary means, but, if necessary, it can rule without them. In the United States the unbounded power of the majority, which is favorable to the legal despotism of the legislature, is likewise favorable to the arbitrary authority of the magistrates. The majority has an entire control over the law when it…