Description
Book SynopsisFrom Larry Siedentop, acclaimed author of Democracy in Europe, Inventing the Individual is a highly original rethinking of how our moral beliefs were formed and their impact on western society today
''Magisterial, timeless, beautifully written ... Siedentop has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has explained us to ourselves'' Spectator
This ambitious and stimulating book describes how a moral revolution in the first centuries AD - the discovery of human freedom and its universal potential - led to a social revolution in the west. The invention of a new, equal social role, the individual, gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe and caste as the basis of social organisation. Larry Siedentop asks us to rethink the evolution of the ideas on which modern societies and government are built, and argues that the core of what is now our system of beliefs emerged much earlier than we think. The roots of liberalism - belief in individ
Trade Review
Magisterial, timeless, beautifully written ... Siedentop has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has explained us to ourselves * Spectator *
One of the most stimulating books of political theory to have appeared in many years ... a refreshingly unorthodox account of the roots of modern liberalism in medieval Christian thinking -- John Gray * Literary Review *
A brave, brilliant and beautifully written defence of the western tradition -- Paul Lay * History Today *
Thoroughly interesting and fundamentally convincing ... admirably nuanced ... formidable ... Inventing the Individual is written with effortless lucidity -- Jeffrey Collins * TLS *
An engrossing book of ideas ... illuminating, beautifully written and rigorously argued -- Kenan Malik * Independent *
A most impressive work of philosophical history -- Robert Skidelsky
