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Benjamin Constant

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“The ancients, as Condorcet says, had no notion of individual rights. Men were, so to speak, merely machines, whose gears and cogwheels were regulated by the law. The same subjection characterized the golden centuries of the Roman Republic; the individual was in some way lost in the nation, the citizen in the city.”


Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

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