An Empire of Reason – Inheritance of the West

American Political History · Jul 4, 2023 · 26m

We hold these truths to be self-evident — but they were not self-evident. For almost the whole of human history, on nearly every patch of the globe, the opposite was assumed: that men are born unequal, that kings rule by the will of God and answer to no one, that the strong command and the weak obey. King James the First told his Parliament that a king was a god on earth, accountable to none. And then a handful of men on the edge of a wilderness wrote down that all men are created equal, that their rights come from God and not the state, and that no government is legitimate without the…