Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

Larry Siedentop

Published by Harvard University Press 2014

Inventing the Individual

The Origins of Western Liberalism

Larry Siedentop

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674736245

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Reviews

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.
-- David Marquand New Republic

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

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.
-- Douglas Murray The Spectator

A most impressive work of philosophical history.
-- Robert Skidelsky

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.
-- David Gress Wall Street Journal

In his brilliant book Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop paints a vivid portrait of the closed world of pagan antiquity.
-- Matthew J. Franck First Things

[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.
-- James Miller The Nation

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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Prologue: What is the West About? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
The World of Antiquity
1. The Ancient Family Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
2. The Ancient City Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
3. The Ancient Cosmos Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
A Moral Revolution
4. The World Turned Upside Down: Paul Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
5. The Truth Within: Moral Equality Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
6. Heroism Redefined Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
7. A New Form of Association: Monasticism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
8. The Weakness of the Will: Augustine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
Towards the Idea of Fundamental Law
9. Shaping New Attitudes and Habits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
10. Distinguishing Spiritual from Temporal Power Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
11. Barbarian Codes, Roman Law and Christian Intuitions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
12. The Carolingian Compromise Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Europe Acquires its Identity
13. Why Feudalism did not Recreate Ancient Slavery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
14. Fostering the ‘Peace of God’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	178
15. The Papal Revolution: A Constitution for Europe? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
16. Natural Law and Natural Rights Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	208
A New Model of Government
17. Centralization and the New Sense of Justice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
18. The Democratizing of Reason Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
19. Steps towards the Creation of Nation-States Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	252
20. Urban Insurrections Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
The Birth Pangs of Modern Liberty
21. Popular Aspirations and the Friars Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
22. The Defence of Egalitarian Moral Intuitions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
23. God’s Freedom and Human Freedom Joined: Ockham Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	306
24. Struggling for Representative Government in the Church Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	321
25. Dispensing with the Renaissance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333
Epilogue: Christianity and Secularism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	349
Select Bibliography and Endnotes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	387

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only
Pages
- Main content: 416

eBook

Published: October 20, 2014
ISBN: 9780674736245