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The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.
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― Judgments on History and Historians
― Judgments on History and Historians
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Legal guarantees of freedom of expression, belief, and worship . . . were, like contemporaneous economic decrees, ways of shrinking certain sources and types of moral policing in favor of increasing state power overall. In much European and colonial law, though with important exceptions, a post-Reformation Christian idea was repurposed so as to make the state itself the guarantor of a wide field of choice.
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― The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
― The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
