Prologue: What is the West About?

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Prologue: What is the West About? 1
4. The World of Antiquity
5. 1. The Ancient Family 7
6. 2. The Ancient City 19
7. 3. The Ancient Cosmos 33
8. A Moral Revolution
9. 4. The World Turned Upside Down: Paul 51
10. 5. The Truth Within: Moral Equality 67
11. 6. Heroism Redefined 79
12. 7. A New Form of Association: Monasticism 88
13. 8. The Weakness of the Will: Augustine 100
14. Towards the Idea of Fundamental Law
15. 9. Shaping New Attitudes and Habits 113
16. 10. Distinguishing Spiritual from Temporal Power 126
17. 11. Barbarian Codes, Roman Law and Christian Intuitions 141
18. 12. The Carolingian Compromise 151
19. Europe Acquires its Identity
20. 13. Why Feudalism did not Recreate Ancient Slavery 165
21. 14. Fostering the ‘Peace of God’ 178
22. 15. The Papal Revolution: A Constitution for Europe? 192
23. 16. Natural Law and Natural Rights 208
24. A New Model of Government
25. 17. Centralization and the New Sense of Justice 225
26. 18. The Democratizing of Reason 237
27. 19. Steps towards the Creation of Nation-States 252
28. 20. Urban Insurrections 265
29. The Birth Pangs of Modern Liberty
30. 21. Popular Aspirations and the Friars 281
31. 22. The Defence of Egalitarian Moral Intuitions 293
32. 23. God’s Freedom and Human Freedom Joined: Ockham 306
33. 24. Struggling for Representative Government in the Church 321
34. 25. Dispensing with the Renaissance 333
35. Epilogue: Christianity and Secularism 349
36. Select Bibliography and Endnotes 365
37. Index 387