An accessible and excitingly refreshing new perspective on how the rights we enjoy in the West were won, and at what personal cost.
In Towards the Light, A.C. Grayling places the liberation of the individual at the centre of the story of Western development between the Reformation and the late 20th Century. The Modern West, he argues, was formed by a series of struggles leading to victories over arbitrary authority, slavery, and ignorance. Paying detailed attention to the dominance, and subsequent erosion, of religious hegemony, absolute rule, feudalism and slavery, Towards the Light focuses on the hard-won reforms in the three hundred years following the Reformation and the way in which they laid the foundations for education and modern democracy.
In an eloquent, grandly epic narrative, Grayling describes how these struggles for liberation have made the Western world what it is today. This is an important story of the liberation of the individual.
