Individual liberty . . . is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.
Benjamin Constant, On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns (“De la Liberté des Anciens Comparée à celle des Modernes,”1819)