hi tkc,
folks in my country fought for a thousand years to establish the rights of individuals against the powers of the state.
the foreshadowing of habeas corpus appears in magna carta and the rights in magna carta partly derive from anglo-saxon law. by the time of the civil war, the rights of individuals were the foundation of the argument between the king and the commons. folks looked back to magna carta and derived their customary freedoms from it, as if these freedoms were a fact established by time immemorial.
even a king is subject to law and must submit to its penalties.
we lived through the experience of the Norman yoke - an absolute monarchy - and fought for our individual liberty. through centuries of hardship and gradual progress. in philosophy, through the development of locke's social contract and separation of powers, burke's reverence for existing institutions, hume's ideas about happiness, mill's harm principle. in the courts, as case law gradually revealed the principles of individual freedom and exceptions to it. the english structures of government were ground out over that same long history.
i think we understand that a person who is free and who has committed no crime retains certain rights. one of these rights is the presumption of innocence. another is a right to a certain amount of privacy.
the right to individual liberty has a tremendous power. it lends a person dignity. it cures him of fear. it vests him in the nation's peace.
the notion of habeas corpus was used in the battle over slavery. no slave could be detained illegally because "the air of england has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it."
this is what freedom under the rule of law means and what it does.
the folks who justify surveillance of free men so as to procure information about the guilty have no understanding of history. they must view personal liberty as a mere detail rather than the central fact of western society. the thing that not only makes us different from east germans, for instance, but also gives us our strength.
freedom under the rule of law is what makes a society stable. worthwhile even. what more is there?
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