Between systemic abuses in the Medieval Catholic Church (see Dante or Luther on the subject) and a nobility whose way of life largely depended on brutal living conditions for serfs, there were plenty of reasons to embrace not only liberal democracy with its political freedom for the individual, but also what we might call metaphysical liberalism—the holistic belief that you are your own. There is a historical progression from political to metaphysical autonomy.6 Whether this progression is inevitable is a separate question. The reality is that as, or soon after, individuals in Europe begin to
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