Throughout Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop details historical events and the cultural development of individualism. He will often outline the position of the agents developing this conception as being in a position of social/political conflict vis a vis another segment of society, where they will then wield it is as a means to justify a power move.

Another interesting thing that Siedentop does is apply what seems like an absolutist/anarchist ontology. Here is a section from page 234-236 on the development of canon law by the Church as an application of anarchism aimed against secular authorities:

Now I want to direct the read to a recent essay by David Ciepley which I have linked before. Note the parallel nature of this argument, and the way neoliberal thinking is structurally isomorphic to the Church in being directed at the secular authorities:

“Neoliberalism was born in reaction against totalitarian statism, and matured at the University of Chicago into a program of state-reduction that was directed not just against the totalitarian state and the socialist state but also (and especially) against the New Deal regulatory and welfare state. Neoliberalism sought to privatize public services, deregulate private services, and shrink social spending.

[…]

For the contradiction between neoliberalism and the corporation to be clear, it is necessary to say a few words about the nature of the business corporation.The business corporation, like any corporation, is a little government. Its deepest roots run back to the municipality of Rome, the first corporation in law, which was at the same time the civitas, or Roman state. More proximately, the business corporation was modeled on the incorporated medieval town, and it carries forward its central legal features. As is true of the town, a corporate firm’s assets are not owned by natural persons, but by an abstract legal entity—the “artificial person” of the corporation, which assumes the legal position of sole proprietor. This fact should immediately explode the most insidious myth about the business corporation, that it is owned by its stockholders. The whole point of the legal form is to transfer ownership of the business assets to this legal entity, which in principle “never dies.” This prevents investors from pulling these assets out and liquidating the firm, and it allows all economic liabilities generated by the firm to be shifted from natural persons to this entity. Since the legal entity owns the assets of the business corporation, the stockholders obviously do not.

[…]

The next legal feature that the business corporation carried over from the town is that, like the officers of a town, the managers and investors of a business corporation are exempt from liability for corporate debts, and in practice almost always escape liability for corporate harms, or torts. This is a second advantage of the corporate form for business. Debts and damages are paid by the corporate entity, not by natural persons. Here, however, an important distinction must be noted between the corporate town and the corporate firm. The officers of the town are elected by those over whom they rule and upon whom they act. Therefore, if they cause harm, it is at their own political risk, regardless of their protection from normal economic and legal risk. The officers of the corporate firm, in contrast, neither rule over nor act upon those who elect them, but rather rule over disenfranchised employees and act on numerous third parties. This relieves those who control corporate firms of most of their personal incentive to avoid causing harm when it is otherwise profitable. If neither the shareholders nor the managers own the assets of the corporate firm, whence derives management’s authority? Like a town, every corporation receives from the state a jurisdiction within which its officers legislate and rule. A university’s board of trustees, for example, legislates and rules over the property and personnel of the university—an authority it receives from the state, via the corporate charter. Similarly, in a business corporation, the board of directors legislates and rules over the property and personnel of the firm, even though the directors may not own any of it. This authority of the board, too, is delegated to it by the state, via a charter. It does not come from the shareholders (who, although they select the occupants of the seats on the board going forward, do not create the board’s structure, procedures, powers, or duties). Indeed, the board is created and begins to operate the business before shares are even issued. The board creates the shareholders; shareholders do not create the board. And prior to that, the state creates the board, and endows it with its authority. This does not make the board and the firm it controls an agent of the state. Rather, it is the state’s franchisee. To spell this out: the corporate firm gets its “personhood” (its right to own and contract as a separate legal entity), its liability regime, its governance structure, and its governing authority from the state, but it hires its own personnel and secures its own financing. This is a franchising relationship, and for this reason, I refer to corporations as “franchise governments.”

[…]

The above exposition of corporations as governing authorities franchised by the civil government is, with slight modification, the classic view of corporations, as expounded, for example, in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. “None but the king can make a corporation,” which the king does either directly or through delegation to others such as the legislature. The authority the corporation wields, Blackstone continues, is a “franchise” of the king, analogous in this respect to the authority that the feudal vassal wields, also delegated from the king. Like lordships, corporations are part of the overall system of government established by the king.3 And this is part of the reason that classical liberals, including Adam Smith, were so suspicious of corporations and wished to circumscribe them.4 They recognized that they were not part of the free market, but represented state interventions in the market. This is, of course, not the view of corporations espoused by neoliberals. The problem that the corporation posed for neoliberals, when neoliberalism first emerged as a self-conscious ideological movement at the end of World War II, is that one could hardly put over a free market agenda if one’s leading business actors were seen as state-created entities. So neoliberals had to retheorize the corporation as a creation of private contract (or at least something that could in principle be created by private contract). Accordingly, stockholders—rechristened “shareholders”—were theorized as owners who hire a board to act on their behalf. (Again, remember how wrong this is; shareholders are not owners of corporate assets, and the board gets its authority before they even exist.) In other words, neoliberals cast the corporation as a glorified partnership, to be operated in the interest of its imagined owners and principals, the stockholders.

This account superficially squares the corporation with market principles of private property and contract. But the social cost has been high. The institutionalization of this account in recent decades has transformed both the boardroom and the workplace, producing what I call the “neoliberal corporation.” And this is responsible for many of the economic inequities and dislocations that plague us today.

We are, quite simply, going around in circles. This isn’t rational, it’s a set of people in a specific power configuration developing arguments that are aimed at a goal irrespective of any overall meaning or understanding, which is why they have to revert to mystical bullshit like providence and progress to fill in the metaphysical gaps. They frankly don’t know what they are talking about.

All Western political thinking is appallingly bad, it needs dropping immediately. There is no salvaging it.