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An Empire of Reason - The Rights of Englishmen
Before the American colonists ever claimed the rights of man, they claimed the rights of Englishmen. For the first ten years of the quarrel with Britain they argued not like philosophers but like lawyers — citing charters with dates on them, quoting Magna Carta, demanding the concrete, inherited liberties of British subjects. This episode takes down the second of the two great rights traditions of the founding: not the universal philosophy of Locke, but the older, particular inheritance won by six centuries of English struggle and written into law.
From the meadow at Runnymede in 1215, where…
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