In this major study, a team of leading European scholars explores ways in which the concept of the individual developed in various areas of political and social life. The story concerns the changing nature of individual identity, community interest and corporate groups, as they were gradually redefined by common western European experiences of universal Catholicism, feudalism, civic republicanism and absolutism, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, commerce and capitalism. As European societies evolved into increasingly centralized national states, there emerged a range of religious and secular discourses which expressed the autonomy of individual agents not only as political subjects but also as private selves.