The millennium year 2000 was full of familiar public intellectuals making big statements about the world’s future and its past. But one of the most influential books published that year came from a much less well-known source.
Larry Siedentop had been a politics don at Oxford since the 1970s, well regarded within academic circles but hardly a household name. The publication of his Democracy in Europe changed all that, as it became a key text in an increasingly fraught debate about European integration.
Whereas most commentary focused on the European Union’s progress towards economic and monetary union or eastward expansion, Siedentop posed fundamental yet rarely addressed questions about its constitutional foundations. The EU had been shaped less by proper political debate than by crises, elite plots and the increasing “triumph of economic language”.
“Bureaucratic despotism” was now the danger, a “government of strangers” breeding “fear, sycophancy and resentment” as the EU began to challenge more directly not only economic interests but national identities. While many — especially in Britain — might fear reunified German power within the union, Siedentop argued that this modern Europe had been especially shaped by French interests. The driving through of the single currency in anxious response to German reunification had reinforced this pattern. That had left Europe, however, “in the hands of bricklayers, not master builders”.
Much of this sounded like music to the ears of Eurosceptics, while those who admired the EU as a kind of proudly “post-modern” constitutional creation were sharply critical of Siedentop’s view. But it was notable that some of the questions he posed were praised as timely by pro-Europeans who wanted the project to acquire more political legitimacy and noted, for example, the poor turnout in European elections.
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Siedentop himself did not advocate simple withdrawal from Europe into nation states but rather the creation of a new constitution that could establish for the EU a clear statement of rights and responsibilities and a proper separation of powers. He hoped that Britain would promote this change within the EU, along with like-minded allies such as the Dutch.
His book’s title was a nod to one of Siedentop’s heroes, Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French historian and politician whose Democracy in America had analysed the evolution of the ideas shaping the creation of the United States. Siedentop believed Europe needed to undertake a root and branch constitutional debate similar to that led by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the US more than two centuries before. “It’s incredibly moving, to see a free people governing itself, and that’s what you see in America, and what you don’t see in Europe,” he said. “I’m not sure how to get there from here, but I know we’ve got to start”.
Among the eventual ambitions, he believed, should be a new form of European federalism. But that, he acknowledged, meant tackling the widely differing understanding within the continent of what such a term meant. For Germans it suggested the kind of radical decentralisation on which their postwar state was based. For many in Britain, by contrast, federalism meant a wholly unacceptable kind of super-state. Siedentop hoped for an arrangement that would counter excessive centralisation and make the governance of an increasingly complex EU possible with sufficient popular consent.
His argument prompted much media comment and made Siedentop an intellectual celebrity. He was granted an audience with the Pope and invited to appear before the European parliament as his book was said to have been read widely by Europe’s political elite. That perhaps forewarned the powers of Brussels and Strasbourg of the difficulties they would face after creating a treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in 2004, which then foundered when rejected by French and Dutch voters in referendums.
Siedentop always believed that progress would take some time, though the debate needed to start immediately. It was never just a matter of short-term political initiative, but necessitated the rediscovery of the shared moral institutions and beliefs that would underpin democratic governance. He explored this historical territory in a second major work, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, published in 2014.
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The essence of the book’s argument, he explained, was that “most societies have been organised around the claims of the family or the tribe or the caste, but European society was different in that it was organised around the individual”. That had in turn prompted a language of rights that were “deemed to provide the proper basis for our legal and political systems. They provide the bedrock of personal identity and social order in the West.”
The roots of all this, Siedentop believed, lay less in classical civilisation and more in Christian thought as a new idea of the individual emerged. “Early Christianity — through the Gospels and Paul’s letters — overturned that assumption of inequality. It promoted a moral revolution. The Christian vision of individuals, each possessing a soul or conscience and the potential for freedom, endowed every human with an equal moral status. That vision contained the seeds of an entirely different conception of society.”
That conception had evolved — albeit very slowly — through the medieval period in areas such as canon law and theological debate about conscience. Siedentop, influenced by the work of another of his heroes, the 19th-century French historian and politician François Guizot, challenged inherited anti-clerical Enlightenment disdain for what was dismissed as the “Dark Ages” with its “monkish” ignorance.
He championed too a new understanding of secularism as something that was far more than “mere indifference or non-belief or a ‘value-free’ framework”. It was based instead on “the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the blind following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others.” Properly understood, he concluded, secularism could be “seen as one of Europe’s noblest achievements”.
Siedentop’s interest in the influence of religion could be traced back to his childhood. He was born in Chicago in 1936 and raised in the traditions of the Calvinist church of his Dutch-German grandmother, sitting through long Sunday sermons. “If you’re a seven or eight-year-old boy” he recalled “getting an elaborate abstract argument from the pulpit isn’t bad for you.” As a master’s student at Harvard he also remembered listening to “really exciting” theologians such as Paul Tillich and Martin Niemöller.
A Marshall scholarship brought him to Oxford in 1960 and he wrote a thesis on “The Limits of Enlightenment” supervised by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin whose work on the defence of liberalism was another great influence. “Those who talked about liberalism in the immediate postwar period,” Siedentop recalled, “knew what a difficult and precarious tradition it is.”
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Siedentop became an Oxford lecturer in political thought and was for many years a fellow of Keble College. Among his students was Ed Balls, the future Labour politician and notable later sceptic about Britain joining the single currency. Before publication of Democracy in Europe Siedentop’s best-known work was a study of Tocqueville published in 1994, and he was working on a biography of Tocqueville in later life.
He was delighted to be awarded a knighthood in 2016 for services to political science. Fond of a daily routine including morning writing and long lunches, he divided his time in Britain between Oxford and a flat in Holland Park in west London, where the cut and thrust of conversation about contemporary matters felt livelier than much academic debate.
Beyond his work he listed his interests as walking, swimming and “looking at old master paintings”. He collected art and generously shared his expertise with friends. Although critical of aspects of modern French politics he loved France itself, speaking the language fluently and spending summers in properties he owned there. He was unmarried.
In recent times Siedentop saw fears he had expressed about European developments being borne out, with the gap between the continent’s elites and their publics leading to the emergence of extremist ideologies. The liberalism he championed, based on the dispersal of power as well as individual rights, had, he felt, “gone badly wrong” in the postwar era, supplanted by a destructive neoliberalism based on market economics.
It was a transatlantic problem too. “Europeans — out of touch with the roots of their tradition — often seem to lack conviction, while Americans may be succumbing to a dangerously simplistic version of their faith.” He feared too what he saw as Donald Trump’s increasingly direct challenge to the US constitution.
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An essential response was to grasp where the western liberal tradition had come from, in order to strengthen its defence. “There’s a lack of understanding, especially of historical understanding, that’s endangering our culture. It has happened in my lifetime.” The post-Brexit debate in Britain, he regretted, exposed much ignorance about constitutional matters including such concepts as “the will of the people”.
“The failure to ask fundamental questions” was the result. It was the posing of just such questions, however, that had made Larry Siedentop’s name.
Sir Larry Siedentop, historian and political philosopher, was born on May 24, 1936. He died on June 13, 2024, aged 88