Just a reminder to people leaving comments, I’m not the typical laissez faire moderator. Obviously you are immediately going to be banned if you go full-snark from the get-go (yes, some commenters are under the illusion that they are brilliant and wise, and unmoderated comment threads allow them to continue with that delusion indefinitely), but repeated stupidity also is going to result in abolition of commenting. Sure some commenters who I have banned are angry, but the reality is that you are probably less intelligent and informative than you’ve been led to think. Better you passively read than contribute to the discussion.
Second, I finished Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, and have been thinking about why the book rubbed me the wrong way. One, the author often writes beautifully.. So whatever qualms I had with the thesis it wasn’t difficult to push myself to finish it. Second, he has a thorough mastery of the material. There was lots of data to extract and assimilate. And I don’t object to the thesis itself, so I’m skeptical. There are plenty of arguments which I don’t agree with beforehand, and which I remain skeptical of, but are worth engaging in.
But here’s a relatively random passage which illustrates my problem:
Why did Ockham insist, above all, on God’s freedom? The biblical argument that freedom reveals the way humans are made ‘in the image of God’ suggests one possible answer. The nominalists were reasserting the Jewish sources of Christian thought against Greek influences. But there is another possibility. The canonist conversion of natural law into a theory of natural rights, founded on the assumption of moral equality, was feeding back into the conception of divinity itself. Emphasizing the claims of the will in human agency led Ockham to emphasize the same trait in divine agency. Human freedom and God’s freedom were becoming mutually reinforcing characteristics. This is why contingency and choice, rather than eternal ideas and a priori knowledge, loomed so large in this thinking. Ockham denied that the kind of a prior knowledge of the universe required by the doctrine of eternal ideas or ‘essences’ is possible. Exaggerating the capabilities of human reason, it compromises God’s freedom and power, his ‘sovereignty’. [page 308, Inventing the Individual]
This section is part of a broader section which seems to suggest that the medieval nomimalism opened up the way for empiricism and liberalism. This is not an original thought. But, I find it ironic because the problem with much of Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism is that it plays out as a logical explication of its own thesis, rather than supporting it with empirical data. In other words, Inventing the Individual oftentimes reminds me of beautifully written scholasticism. Larry Siedentop, the author, believes in the power of ideas to change the human soul. His argument is not a particularly original one, suggesting that the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion which manifested in the form of St. Paul laid the seedbed for the core assumptions of liberal individualism, which came to maturity over a millennium later. But the argument is rather thin on empirical examples of how individuals themselves conceived of themselves as liberal individuals, rather focusing on the 50,000 foot view from the organic development of social institutions, or the abstruse details of canon law.
In Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic Matthew Stewart makes a similar sort of argument, though the details obviously differ. Like Siedentop Stewart is a very good writer. His prose is not a drag to work through. Arguably he took a more novelistic tack, focusing more on personality and lives than Siedentop did (Stewart is focused I think on a more general audience). In addition, Stewart took a much softer touch in arguing for this thesis than Siedentop.* That probably is the key in being able to appreciate the work without being annoyed by the author’s agenda. Like Siedentop Stewart marshaled intellectual history to support his argument, but the explicit details of the argument served more of a coda, allowing the reader to come to their own conclusion. In contrast, in Inventing the Individual the author always talks about how the individual was invented! Yes, we get it. The individual was invented, rather than always being there.
Overall I can see why those who agree with the thesis proffered are enthusiastic about this book. It’s very well written, and it is dense with quite a bit of erudition. And, if you agree with the thesis, the relatively heavy-handed manner in which all roads lead to the invented individual won’t come off as so annoying. Rather, it’s probably just part of the backdrop which you barely notice. It’s rather different if you’re trying to convince someone, and you keep waving about the big hammer, threatening to nail the truth into their heads. For much of the text Siedentop almost takes for granted that the readers already accept the thesis, and enters into long sequences of propositions which beautifully outline how it all came to be, except for the fact that those who are unconvinced will object to every inference made in the sequence from beginning to end. It’s kind of like reading Alvin Plantiga.
* For what it’s worth I’m skeptical of Stewart’s thesis too. But it’s much more modest, and I think I can say with more assurance that there is something real there. Tracing intellectual pedigrees from the 17th century down to the 18th is a far easier haul than traversing the 1st to the 15th.
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