‘Inventing the Individual’, by Larry Siedentop - FT.com: "Medieval Catholic theology, philosophy and law are not the most obvious places to look for the roots of western liberalism, which, according to Larry Siedentop, can be found in the idea of “moral equality” among individual human beings. It is this concept, he believes, that marks out the Christian west from the rest of the world, and that provided the seed bed from which sprouted a liberal ideology that has proclaimed itself to be staunchly secular, forgetting its Catholic origins."
“In its basic assumptions,” he asserts, “liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity”, for “liberalism rests on the moral assumptions provided by Christianity”.
'via Blog this'
