Description
Argues that the concept of personal freedom developed as it did only in the Western world because of the role of women, along with slaves and foreigners, as outsiders, but that the Christian concept of spiritual freedom led to the justification of social hierarchies
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A great (both in reach and accomplishment) piece of work by the distinguished sociologist (Harvard U.), volume 1 of the projected two-volume history of freedom traces the evolution of freedom from Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BC through the permutations wrought by imperial Rome and the Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly, the Jamaican-born Patterson, long-concerned with the problems of oppression in both his early novels and later analytic studies, is particularly good on the relationship between the birth of freedom and the institution of slavery. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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