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Michael Drolet, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, by Larry Siedentop, The English Historical Review, Volume 131, Issue 548, February 2016, Pages 133–135, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev353
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This is an illuminating work. Its narrative is beguiling, its thesis enticing. Reviewers in the educated press have been charmed by it, praising the book for being both thoughtful and original. Thoughtful it is. Original it is not. Larry Siedentop has produced a twenty-first century reworking of the work of two eminent nineteenth-century French historians: Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and, above all, François Guizot. Inspired by these two greats, Siedentop gives us his own contribution to the debate of the ancients versus moderns, and the concomitant defence of certain liberal values which this involves. He sees these values to be under threat from numerous intellectual and cultural quarters. The intellectual threats—all defined to a greater or lesser degree by a conception of community or collectivity that can be traced back to antiquity—are Marxism, communitarianism and republicanism. The cultural threats encompass Islam, and the ‘crass’ form of ‘utilitarianism’ that marks many modern economies, in particular modern China. These intellectual and cultural threats offend, in Siedentop’s words, ‘our deepest intuitions’, which are, according to him, embodied in liberalism.
