We see the emergence of a new sense of justice, founded on the assumption of moral equality rather than on natural inequality

We are always trying to understand the unique role that Western Civilization has played in the modern world. Was it due to technology, to economic systems, to happenstance, to geography? There are innumerable arguments and theories.

One of the relatively undisputed points is that the role of the individual in the social system is unusual in the West with the associated ideas of personal responsibility, mastership of one's destiny, agency, liberty, etc. There is a new book out, Inventing the Individual by Larry Siednetop which is reviewed by David Gress in Where ‘I’ Comes From.

‘What is the West about?” asks Larry Siedentop, an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford. Years of reflecting on the character of Western societies lead him to an answer that resembles the one given by most political thinkers: namely, that the West is about liberty, with official authority deriving from the people themselves and with official institutions having only a limited say in the conduct of the citizen and the course of society. But Mr. Siedentop’s full answer is unusual. In “Inventing the Individual,” he asks where the Western understanding of liberty comes from and finds—unlike most political thinkers—that its source is Christianity.

This part of the answer, as Mr. Siedentop notes, may prove irritating, because it flies in the face of the comfortable idea that democratic liberty, like modern science, grew out of the 18th-century Enlightenment and, in particular, out of the Enlightenment’s struggle against a reactionary and oppressive church. Not so, he says. Western freedom centers on the notion of the responsible individual endowed with a sovereign conscience and unalienable rights, and that notion emerged, in stages, during the centuries between Paul the Apostle and the churchmen of the Middle Ages.

Mr. Siedentop begins his analytical narrative by contrasting ancient ideas of family and cosmos with the ideas provoked by early Christianity. In the ancient world, he says, the individual did not exist as such. Everyone had his place within a hierarchy, which in turn determined all aspects of existence. The core unit was the family, ruled by the “paterfamilias.” Similarly, the fundamental maxim of Roman law was to “give each his due,” which meant assigning to each a particular status within the all-encompassing web of social and legal norms: the father as ruler of the family, the emperor as ruler of the state and its people, and the slave as a “human tool” subject to the will of his owner. Roman law presumed indelible distinctions: slave-free, citizen-alien, master-follower.

Christianity, as preached by St. Paul in the first century and by St. Augustine in the fourth, promised something quite different, and revolutionary. “In Paul’s writings,” Mr. Siedentop writes, “we see the emergence of a new sense of justice, founded on the assumption of moral equality rather than on natural inequality.” A Christian idea of individual dignity, Mr. Siedentop says, led to what we call the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This notion incorporated a new principle of justice and fatally undermined the idea of “giving each his due.” Only a century after Paul, a church father could write that “one mighty deed alone,” meaning the incarnation, “was sufficient for our God to bring freedom to the human person.”

Sounds like an interesting thesis with much intuitive appeal.