Sobre Liberdade(s)

The course of history led from an initial state of servitude, by way of a gradual process of liberalization, to the conquest by the subject of growing areas of liberty, but the doctrine proceeds in the opposite direction: only by taking as its starting-point a hypothetical initial state of liberty, and conceiving of man as naturally free, does it arrive at the constrution of a political society as a society in which sovereignty is limited. Thus it is that the doctrine - here the doctrine of natural rights - inverts the course of historical events, treating as origin or foundation, as that which is historically the result, which occurs posterius.

Noberto Bobbio, in Liberalism and Democracy [Radical Thinkers Collection - Verso 2005]