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