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Quote by Lord Acton

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The History of Freedom: Great Event

This book explores significant episodes in the evolution of freedom as a concept and practice, tracing how various movements, documents, and turning points have shaped the understanding and exercise of individual and collective liberties. The work considers how struggles for emancipation, self-determination, and civil rights have unfolded in different historical contexts, and how these developments continue to inform contemporary discussions about governance, citizenship, and human dignity. The scope encompasses philosophical foundations, institutional developments, and social transformations that have advanced or contested the expansion of freedom in public and private life. more

Author

Lord Acton
Lord Acton

British historian and political theorist, renowned for his profound insights into the relationship between freedom, power, and corruption. Lord Acton was one of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian era, and his works are still widely cited today. more

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“The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master”

“The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialist promise us, and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice: it must be the freedom of economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right”

“It may be that a free society... carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.”