Civil Right and Civil Liberties

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, political and social concepts referring to guarantees of freedom, justice, and equality that a state may make to its citizens. Although the terms have no precise meaning in law and are sometimes used interchangeably, distinctions may be made. Civil rights is used to imply that the state has a positive role in ensuring all citizens equal protection under law and equal opportunity to exercise the privileges of citizenship and otherwise to participate fully in national life, regardless of race, religion, sex, or other characteristics unrelated to the worth of the individual. Civil liberties is used to refer to guarantees of freedom of speech, press, or religion; to due process of law; and to other limitations on the power of the state to restrain or dictate the actions of individuals. The two concepts of equality and liberty are overlapping and interacting; equality implies the ordering of liberty within society so that the freedom of one person does not infringe on the rights of others, just as liberty implies the right to act in ways permitted to others.

EARLY LIFES

Individual freedom can survive only under a system of law by which both the sovereign and the governed are bound. Such a system of fundamental laws, whether written or embodied in tradition, is known as a constitution. The idea of government limited by law received effective expression for the first time in the Magna Carta (1215), which checked the power of the English king. The Magna Carta did not stem from democratic or egalitarian beliefs; rather, it was a treaty between king and nobility that defined their relationship and laid the basis for the concept that the ruler was subject to the law rather than above it. The development of constitutional government was slowed by the persistence of the ideas of absolutism, the belief that all political power should be in the hands of one individual, and divine right, which held that kings derived their power from—and were accountable only to—God. These beliefs were widely held throughout Europe until the 18th century. The notion that the people have the right to be asked to consent to acts of government did not arrive without a protracted struggle. The reigns of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs in England were marked by fierce conflicts between the Crown and Parliament.

On the European continent the struggle between authoritarian and libertarian principles developed around religious rather than secular issues. During the Reformation, freedom of religious belief and practice was a primary concern. Tolerance was rare; as late as 1612, for instance, members of the Unitarian sect were burned as heretics in England (see Unitarianism). Not until the end of the 18th century did the ideals of religious toleration become firmly established in Western civilization.