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. Beginning with a moral revoluti...
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. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism—another of Christianity’s gifts to the West.
Inventing the Individual tells how a new, equal social role, the individual, arose and gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe, and caste as the basis of social organization. Asking us to rethink the evolution of ideas on which Western societies and government are built, Siedentop contends that the core of what is now the West’s system of beliefs emerged earlier than we commonly think. The roots of liberalism—belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people—all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West.
作者简介
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Larry Siedentop is Emeritus Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
目录
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Prologue: What is the West About?
The World of Antiquity
1. The Ancient Family
2. The Ancient City
3. The Ancient Cosmos
A Moral Revolution
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(更多)
Prologue: What is the West About?
The World of Antiquity
1. The Ancient Family
2. The Ancient City
3. The Ancient Cosmos
A Moral Revolution
4. The World Turned Upside Down: Paul
5. The Truth Within: Moral Equality
6. Heroism Redefined
7. A New Form of Association: Monasticism
8. The Weakness of the Will: Augustine
Towards the Idea of Fundamental Law
9. Shaping New Attitudes and Habits
10. Distinguishing Spiritual from Temporal Power
11. Barbarian Codes, Roman Law and Christian Intuitions
12. The Carolingian Compromise
Europe Acquires its Identity
13. Why Feudalism did not Recreate Ancient Slavery
14. Fostering the ‘Peace of God’
15. The Papal Revolution: A Constitution for Europe?
16. Natural Law and Natural Rights
A New Model of Government
17. Centralization and the New Sense of Justice
18. The Democratizing of Reason
19. Steps towards the Creation of Nation-States
20. Urban Insurrections
The Birth Pangs of Modern Liberty
21. Popular Aspirations and the Friars
22. The Defence of Egalitarian Moral Intuitions
23. God’s Freedom and Human Freedom Joined: Ockham
24. Struggling for Representative Government in the Church
25. Dispensing with the Renaissance
Epilogue: Christianity and Secularism
Select Bibliography and Endnotes
Index
· · · · · · (收起)
The development of Islamic fundamentalism – and the terrorist movements it sometimes inspires– is the most obvious example. A view of the world in which religious law excludes a secular sphere and in which the subordination of women compromises belief in human equality is incompatible with moral intuitions widespread in the West. And that is only one example. The transmuting of Marxist socialism into quasi-capitalism in the world’s largest country, China, provides another. In China the governing ideology has become a crass form of utilitarianism, enshrining majority interests even at the expense of justice or human liberty. That, too, offends some of our deepest intuitions. (查看原文)
断断续续看了2年终于看完了，读过几本其他关于基督教历史的书，这本书让我对基督教的理解又上了一个新的台阶，理论性很强读着比较累然而就是停不下来，对作者的核心观点我很赞同，基督教的发展奠定了欧洲现代自由主义的基础，文艺复兴并不是现代欧洲的开端。“The reason is that liberalism as a coherent doctrine was not born willingly. It...断断续续看了2年终于看完了，读过几本其他关于基督教历史的书，这本书让我对基督教的理解又上了一个新的台阶，理论性很强读着比较累然而就是停不下来，对作者的核心观点我很赞同，基督教的发展奠定了欧洲现代自由主义的基础，文艺复兴并不是现代欧洲的开端。“The reason is that liberalism as a coherent doctrine was not born willingly. It was certainly never a project of the church. ” 它是基督教宗教哲学发展和碰撞的结果。(展开)
前言：西方意味着什么（Prologue: What is the West About?） 全球背景下看待西方，最突出之处在于正处在各种信念的相互竞争中【1】（If we look at the West against a global background, the striking thing about our situation is that we are in a competition of belief...
(展开)
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1 有用 丁萌 2015-03-08 11:44:27
作者把自己的读书笔记整理了一下……
0 有用 毛毛球球 2023-10-03 16:35:22 上海
断断续续看了2年终于看完了，读过几本其他关于基督教历史的书，这本书让我对基督教的理解又上了一个新的台阶，理论性很强读着比较累然而就是停不下来，对作者的核心观点我很赞同，基督教的发展奠定了欧洲现代自由主义的基础，文艺复兴并不是现代欧洲的开端。“The reason is that liberalism as a coherent doctrine was not born willingly. It... 断断续续看了2年终于看完了，读过几本其他关于基督教历史的书，这本书让我对基督教的理解又上了一个新的台阶，理论性很强读着比较累然而就是停不下来，对作者的核心观点我很赞同，基督教的发展奠定了欧洲现代自由主义的基础，文艺复兴并不是现代欧洲的开端。“The reason is that liberalism as a coherent doctrine was not born willingly. It was certainly never a project of the church. ” 它是基督教宗教哲学发展和碰撞的结果。 (展开)
0 有用 Lucien在昂古莱 2023-02-26 05:13:14 美国
野心很大但execution平庸而且都是二手资料，对外行有用不过有限，视角过于老保，极右翼喜欢引这书还是挺能说明问题的