Eighteenth-century individualism turned freedom-inequality tension into an ethical and religious paradox

Evidence

Thus, eighteenth-century individualism made the sociological antinomy between freedom and inequality, with which I began my discussion, into an ethical paradox, too: the antinomy was conceived as the innermost spring of man’s nature, and yet as imposing the renunciation of the self. And it also makes it into a religious paradox that is expressed in the axiom, “He who loses his soul shall find it.” — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2619

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bourgeois Enlightenment traded freedom for self-preservation early on