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> personal agency & liberty Those two were very suppressed under monarchy and the Christian religion. It wasn’t until modern secularism that those two truly bl

• FredPret 2y ago
  Even so there were clear steps in the right direction. Monarchs grew steadily more circumscribed from a de jure point of view. Eventually they became constitutional monarchs, then mere figureheads. Their de facto power also went from absolute steadily downward. The same trend happened with Christianity: at one time the Pope was so powerful, he broke up the Holy Roman Empire. But there were many reformations, revolutions, Protestantism. There's a clear trend of decentralization across the entire West, spanning a thousand years - because of individuals insisting on what we now call their inalienable human rights.