Man should be the source of Law

"The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 290). 

The irony is that in order for Man to have become emancipated from all tutelage he had to devise a system whereby the entire society remained in its adolescent state, where scarcity ruled and growth was the only accepted objective of collective decision-making. 

Where society sees itself as adult it sees itself as a steward where some authority regulates conduct according to the dictates of responsibility and, probably, the cardinal virtues. Something however was lost with Man's emancipation from the hidebound estates of tradition and custom. The limitations on authority that custom or God would impose on the rulers through the agency of civil society or an appeal to human decency – the emancipation also suspended all those conservative forces too. 

The exercise of absolute power by the state and by the police, and the corresponding loss of autonomy and dignity for the general public, becomes not only a possibility but also almost an inevitability under the new world order ushered in by the French Revolution.