Inventing the Individual

This ambitious and stimulating book asks us to rethink the evolution of the ideas on which modern states are built. Larry Siedentop argues that the core of what is now our system of beliefs - liberalism founded on the individual - emerged much earlier than generally recognised, established not in the Renaissance but by the arguments of lawyers and philosophers between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. There are large parts of the world - fundamentalist Islam; quasi-capitalist China - where other belief systems flourish. Faced with these challenges, understanding the origins of our own liberal ideas is more than ever an important part of knowing who we are.