In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, against a background of protracted wars and the rising tax burden that went with them, a culture of rebellion developed in a number of countries. It was said that the misery was caused by corruption. The moral basis of the ancien régime was thereby eroded and the sovereignty of kings rapidly lost legitimacy. This heralded the start of a revolutionary era, one that was already seen by contemporaries as being of global historical significance. Whilst the revolutions in the United States and France are the best-known examples, this was a worldwide phenomenon.

The vacuum that consequently developed in the public order was filled with the idea of popular sovereignty. Although it was interpreted in various ways, lying at its heart was the notion that people had inalienable rights. Regardless of class, belief or race, they were all citizens, and this gave them the right to shape the community to which they belonged. It justified the abolition of the privileges that had been associated with class and belief, bringing an end to the ‘politics of difference’: people no longer belonged to different classes, neighbourhoods or religious dominations, but were individuals who in principle had equal rights and duties. And whilst women were excluded from the political domain more emphatically than before, Jews now had civil rights, for example, Catholics were permitted to hold government posts in formerly ‘Protestant nations’ (and vice versa), and a start was made to the abolition of slavery.

The most outspoken representative of this new gospel in the Western world was the English-American writer and politician, Thomas Paine, who published The Rights of Man in 1791. For Paine, a political order was an agreement between the members of a community on how they should exercise a number of shared rights. A written constitution, the contract, was the first step towards this, followed by a rational electoral system. In this way, ‘government by hereditary succession’ would be replaced by ‘government by election and representation’, if necessary by violent means. To clarify: Paine was not proposing the introduction of something similar to what we now understand as ‘democracy’; at most, that was only suitable for very small, well-organized states.