Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

by Larry Siedentop

Overview

Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674744738
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/20/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	843,914
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Larry Siedentop is Emeritus Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Contents Prologue: What is the West About? The World of Antiquity Chapter 1. The Ancient Family Chapter 2. The Ancient City Chapter 3. The Ancient Cosmos A Moral Revolution Chapter 4. The World Turned Upside Down: Paul Chapter 5. The Truth Within: Moral Equality Chapter 6. Heroism Redefined Chapter 7. A New Form of Association: Monasticism Chapter 8. The Weakness of the Will: Augustine Towards the Idea of Fundamental Law Chapter 9. Shaping New Attitudes and Habits Chapter 10. Distinguishing Spiritual from Temporal Power Chapter 11. Barbarian Codes, Roman Law and Christian Intuitions Chapter 12. The Carolingian Compromise Europe Acquires its Identity Chapter 13. Why Feudalism did not Recreate Ancient Slavery Chapter 14. Fostering the ‘Peace of God’ Chapter 15. The Papal Revolution: A Constitution for Europe? Chapter 16. Natural Law and Natural Rights A New Model of Government Chapter 17. Centralization and the New Sense of Justice Chapter 18. The Democratizing of Reason Chapter 19. Steps towards the Creation of Nation-States Chapter 20. Urban Insurrections The Birth Pangs of Modern Liberty Chapter 21. Popular Aspirations and the Friars Chapter 22. The Defence of Egalitarian Moral Intuitions Chapter 23. God’s Freedom and Human Freedom Joined: Ockham Chapter 24. Struggling for Representative Government in the Church Chapter 25. Dispensing with the Renaissance Epilogue: Christianity and Secularism Select Bibliography and Endnotes Index

Editorial Reviews

In this learned, subtle, enjoyable and digestible work [Siedentop] has offered back to us a proper version of ourselves. He has explained us to ourselves… [A] magisterial, timeless yet timely work.

The Spectator - Douglas Murray

Siedentop’s argument should change the way we look at both the Middle Ages and the formation of the modern nation-state.

Tweed’s - Randy Rosenthal

Like the best books, Inventing the Individual both teaches you something new and makes you want to argue with it.

Kenan Malik

With Inventing the Individual, Siedentop is not trying to reveal a hidden or suppressed religious impulse in Western modernity but rather attempting to trace a lost genealogy. He sees modern secularism, and its freedoms, as Christianity’s gift to human society.

Wall Street Journal - David Gress

[Siedentop] has produced what amounts to a high-altitude survey of Western ideas, meant to show that the ideal of the autonomous individual and the fact of a pluralistic civil society are both in important respects outgrowths of Christianity… Larry Siedentop has written a philosophical history in the spirit of Voltaire, Condorcet, Hegel, and Guizot. Serious scholars of history will always pick holes in these works. Yet at their most cogent and pointed, such frankly polemical metanarratives of human history help us to understand better not just the history of the present (to borrow a phrase), but also ourselves. At a time when we on the left need to be stirred from our dogmatic slumbers, Inventing the Individual is a reminder of some core values that are pretty widely shared.

The Nation - James Miller

A most impressive work of philosophical history.

Robert Skidelsky

In his brilliant book Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop paints a vivid portrait of the closed world of pagan antiquity.

First Things - Matthew J. Franck

It is a magnificent work of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual history. It is hard to decide which is more remarkable: the breadth of learning displayed on almost every page, the infectious enthusiasm that suffuses the whole book, the riveting originality of the central argument, or the emotional power and force with which it is deployed. Siedentop takes us on a 2,000-year journey that starts with the almost inconceivably remote city states of the ancient world and ends with the Renaissance. In the course of this journey, he explodes many (perhaps even most) of the preconceptions that run through the public culture of our day—and that I took for granted before reading his book. Inventing the Individual is not an exercise in dry-as-dust antiquarianism, still less in pop-historical fun and games. Siedentop’s aim has a breathtaking grandeur about it: to persuade us to ask ourselves who we are and where we are going by showing us where we have come from. A challenging epilogue suggests that the answers are not very flattering.

New Republic - David Marquand