Interested by this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e-newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Friends Programme to find out how you can help our work.

As Larry Siedentop and Nick Spencer have shown in their recent books — respectively, Inventing the Individual and The Evolution of the West — the very idea of the individual and its prominence in the West stems from the Christian notion of the prophet called by God to stand up for justice and therefore out from the surrounding mass. And the concept of a right attaching to the individual was first developed by 13th-century canon lawyers, not 17th-century philosophers.

Regarding political liberty, Christianity’s origins on the wrong side of the social tracks developed into an institutional stand-off between church and state in the West, which created space for a flourishing civil society generally lacking in the Islamic world. And the germ of democratic accountability lies in late medieval attempts to curb the power of an absolutist papacy by lodging supreme authority in a council — effectively a parliament — of the whole church.

Nigel Biggar | Read the full article from The Times.

Image available from The Times.