Catallaxy ® Institute - Classical Liberalism

Also, the eighteenth-century's determination to derive the characteristics of a good society from the innate characteristics of the individual man may well have been fostered in part by the corpuscolarism of the seventeenth century. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought the individual appears again and again as the atom from which the mechanism, society, is fabricated. In the opening paragraph of the declaration of independence, Jefferson derived the right to revolution from the God-given or inalienable rights of the social atom, man, and his derivation seems to parallel the one in which Newton, a century earlier, had derived the mechanism of nature from God-given or innate properties of the individual physical atom.

Kuhn, Thomas S.

The Copernican Revolution

1957 , p. 263