Not only this, but at the core of both ancient thinking and ancient society was the assumption of natural inequality. Different levels of social status, Siedentop argues, reflected what were taken to be inherent differences of being. Crucially, it was this assumption of natural inequality that was to be overturned by the Pauline interpretation of the significance of the life of Christ. As Siedentop expresses it, Paul wagered on human equality and in doing so he set out a Christian understanding of community as "the free association of the wills of morally equal agents". 

In essence, the remainder of Siedentop's Inventing the Individual seeks to show how this new assumption of the moral equality of humans came, over a thousand years and more, to transform the way in which we conceived of both society and government. 

At its heart is the claim that the Christian assumption of moral equality in turn gave rise to a commitment to the equal liberty of all individuals. If this is true, it follows, as Siedentop states, that it was the canon lawyers and philosophers of medieval Europe and not, as has usually been assumed, the writers of the Renaissance and their rediscovery of ancient humanism who are largely responsible for our modern conception of liberty and who therefore can lay claim to having established the fundamentals of modern liberalism. As Siedentop writes, the canon lawyers and philosophers of the 14th and 15th centuries "laid the foundation for a private, rights-based sphere, where freedom and conscience prevailed".

There is much that is intriguing in this audacious argument. For example, if Siedentop is clear that liberalism can be described as the child of Christianity, he acknowledges that this was quite definitely not what the church intended. Indeed, Siedentop goes so far as to say that Christian intuitions of moral equality were turned against an authoritarian church only too eager to enforce belief. 

But there is another aspect of his argument that is well worth dwelling upon. One of Siedentop's key points is that the Christian belief in the equality of souls made it no longer possible to conceive of government primarily as rule over families, clans and castes. In short, the aristocratic character of the ancient city was destroyed. Henceforth, government would be seen as rule over individuals. Here is to be found the birth of the idea of the modern state. Yet, by making the individual, as opposed to the group, the object of rule, was there not the very high risk that the individual could become the bearer of equal subjection rather than of equal liberty? Could not the state as well as the church be an instrument of tyranny? 

Siedentop's response is to suggest that the claims of moral equality were sufficiently strong as to provide a basis for limiting the power of the state. And so it was that equality of status came to be accepted as the only proper basis for a legal system, that the defence of individual liberty took the form of an assertion of natural rights, and that some form of representative government was alone thought to be legitimate.

However, as Siedentop accepts, the outstanding political fact of this period was the centralising of power by monarchs intent on destroying the last vestiges of feudalism. The survival of the English Parliament was the signal exception. Elsewhere, the Estates-General in France, the Cortes of Spain and the Imperial Diet in Germany were crushed. Moreover, as the traditional corporate model of society lost legitimacy, the populace saw their subjection to royal authority as gain rather than loss. No one expressed the argument for the absolutism of the sovereign better than Thomas Hobbes. The new Leviathan put an end to the war of all against all.

 

This is where Siedentop's account ends. But it invites us to think about what happened next. This is perhaps no better revealed than by one of the thinkers most admired by Siedentop: the 19th-century politician and writer François Guizot. Guizot's The History of Civilization in Europe, delivered first as a series of lectures in 1828, was one of the most important historical works of its age. It had as great an influence upon Karl Marx as it did upon Alexis de Tocqueville.