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Books

Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms

How did we get here? Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how our religious tradition brought us individualism, equality — and charity

22 February 2014

9:00 AM

22 February 2014

9:00 AM

Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism Larry Siedentop

Allen Lane, pp.433, £20, ISBN: 9780713996449

If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16. Tel: 08430 600033. Douglas Murray is an associate director of the Henry Jackson Society and blogs at spectator.co.uk/murray.

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