… is from Alberto Mingardi’s superb recent essay “Hijacking Liberalism: Spencer’s The Man Versus the State“:
To assess the degree of liberty individuals do enjoy, [Herbert] Spencer argued, what matters is “whether the lives of citizens are more interfered with than they were; not the nature of the agency which interferes with them.” That we elect our rulers does not necessarily mean that they rule us well, nor that they respect our liberties. The “divine rights of majorities,” he cautioned, are no less a superstition than the divine rights of kings.
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