Some ideas change the world once enough people hold them.

Runnymede, 1215

English barons made King John set his seal to a charter: no free man could be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land.

The Pope annulled it within weeks. The idea that even a king is under the law outlived them both. American colonists cited it against Parliament, and it runs through the Fifth Amendment's promise of due process and the right to trial by jury.

London, 1689

After more than a century of religious war, John Locke argued that people should be free to hold beliefs their neighbors think are wrong, and to live by them.

Toleration was a radical proposal then. Most people in free countries now take it for granted, and it is much of why they live in peace beside neighbors who believe differently.

London, March 1776

Adam Smith argued that nations grow rich when ordinary people are free to work, trade and invest as they see fit, and poor when rulers hand out monopolies and wall off trade.

The officials and merchants of his day believed one nation's gain was another's loss. Smith's idea that both sides of a free trade come out ahead is now where economics begins.

Philadelphia, July 1776

Four months later, the Declaration of Independence said that people are born with rights no government grants, and that governments rest on the consent of the governed.

Many of the men who signed it held slaves. The movements that followed held the country to its own words.

London, 1787

Twelve men met in a London print shop to end the slave trade. For most of history, nearly every large society had allowed slavery.

Britain and the United States both outlawed the trade in 1807. The idea that no one may own another person had begun to spread.

Rochester, 1847

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery nine years earlier, founded a newspaper called The North Star to argue for ending slavery outright.

In 1852 he asked a Rochester audience, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Slavery ended in the United States in 1865, and in Brazil, the last country in the Americas to give it up, in 1888.

Seneca Falls, 1848

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and three other women called a convention. Its declaration rewrote 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.”

Married women in most states could not own property or keep their own wages. Frederick Douglass was there and spoke for the resolution on the vote. State by state those laws fell, and the vote followed in 1920.

The next idea is about force.

People flourish less when they are coerced, robbed, or defrauded, and more when they are persuaded and left to cooperate freely.

The Philosophy of Human Respect starts from that observation. Libertarians apply it to everyone, and broadly reject the exceptions most people make for government and elected officials: persuade, don't coerce, and let each person live by their own values.

Today you can measure how many people already hold it.

Ten questions place each person by two scores: how much government they want in their personal life, and how much in their livelihood. The two-score chart is David Nolan’s, from 1971. Advocates for Self-Government adapted it into the five-region diamond the quiz uses. Each light is thirty people who took the quiz. Where the chart comes from.

27%

already answer like a libertarian. Only 12% of them use the word.

Of 146,944 people who completed the quiz from July 1 to October 26, 2026. They chose to take a political quiz, so they are a self-selected sample, not the country. See the whole count.