Includes bibliographical references and index

Prologue: What is the West about? -- THE WORLD OF ANTIQUITY -- The ancient family -- The ancient city -- The ancient cosmos -- A MORAL REVOLUTION -- The world turned upside down: Paul -- The truth within: moral equality -- Heroism redefined -- A new form of association: monasticism -- The weakness of the will: Augustine -- TOWARDS THE IDEA OF FUNDAMENTAL LAW -- Shaping new attitudes and habits -- Distinguishing spiritual from temporal power -- Barbarian codes, Roman law and Christian intuitions -- The Carolingian compromise -- EUROPE ACQUIRES ITS IDENTITY -- Why feudalism did not recreate ancient slavery -- Fostering the 'Peace of God' -- The papal revolution: a constitution for Europe? -- Natural law and natural rights -- A NEW MODEL OF GOVERNMENT -- Centralization and the new sense of justice -- The democratizing of reason -- Steps towards the creation of nation-states -- Urban insurrections -- THE BIRTH PANGS OF MODERN LIBERTY -- Popular aspirations and the Friars -- The defence of egalitarian moral intuitions -- God's freedom and human freedom joined: Ockham -- Struggling for representative government in the church -- Dispensing with the Renaissance -- Epilogue: Christianity and secularism -- Select bibliography and endnotes -- Index

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. -- Book Jacket