Articles & Papers
Nominalism and the Genealogy of the Modern Self
From the loss of universals, through the Reformation and Enlightenment liberalism, to the sovereignty of the will.
Download the full PDF One-page summary (PDF)Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas hold that universals are real, natures are fixed and knowable, and morality is read off the order of being: law is “an ordinance of reason for the common good” (ST I-II, q.90, a.4). What follows is the long unwinding of that consensus, traced through a single thread — the migration of moral authority from nature to will.
William of Ockham · Summa Logicae, c.1323
- The metaphysical move: only individuals exist; universals are concepts and names. The razor — no entities beyond necessity — and common natures are the first casualty.
- Moral authority: divine command ethics — acts are right because God wills them, not because natures require them. Potentia absoluta: God’s freedom stands above any created order.
- Trajectory: morality is unhooked from nature and re-grounded in will. Once the ground is will, the only remaining question is whose.
The Via Moderna · Gabriel Biel, Collectorium, c.1488
- Nominalism becomes the “modern way” of the German universities — Erfurt, Tübingen, and the schools that formed the Reformers.
- Pactum theology: God accepts human effort by covenanted arrangement, not intrinsic merit — facere quod in se est.
- Grace contractualized; late-medieval piety strained to the breaking point (Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology).
Martin Luther · De Servo Arbitrio, 1525
- Formed at Erfurt in the via moderna; acknowledged Ockham as his master in dialectic. Rejects scholastic realism and Aristotle’s authority in theology.
- Radical voluntarism: the hidden God (Deus absconditus), whose will answers to no created measure.
- Justification by imputation — righteousness declared over nature, not infused into it; the sacramental cosmos begins to thin.
John Calvin · Institutes, 1559
- Iconoclasm and desacralization: creation as the theater of God’s glory, not the bearer of divine presence.
- God’s will as “the highest rule of righteousness” (Inst. 3.23.2); sovereign decree over discernible order.
- Disenchantment advances (Taylor); vocation relocates holiness into secular work.
Thomas Hobbes · Leviathan, 1651
- Nominalism made explicit: nothing in the world is universal but names; reasoning is reckoning with names.
- No summum bonum; “good” names whatever a man desires; law is the sovereign’s command — auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem.
- Political order rebuilt from below, by contract; the state replaces the Church as keeper of the peace.
John Locke · Essay (1690); Two Treatises (1689)
- Nominal essences: species are boundaries our ideas draw, not kinds nature gives.
- Government by consent; every man has “a property in his own person”; toleration privatizes religious truth.
- Liberal individualism canonized: the self as proprietor of itself, prior to any community or given end.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Second Discourse (1755); Émile (1762)
- Nature relocated inward: the authentic inner self precedes society and sits in judgment over it.
- Sentiment and conscience over external order; society corrupts; the general will collectivizes voluntarism.
- Expressive individualism is born (Taylor): identity becomes an inner truth demanding outward recognition (Trueman).
Enlightenment Liberalism · Kant, Groundwork (1785); Mill, On Liberty (1859)
- Autonomy: the rational will legislates the moral law to itself; no given telos constrains it.
- Mill: “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
- Morality refounded on self-legislation; liberty redefined as self-sovereignty, fenced only by the harm principle.
Friedrich Nietzsche · On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887
- No moral facts, only interpretations; with God dead, essences and given values die with him.
- Will to power: values are created, not discovered; the strong transvalue what the weak received.
- The voluntarist arc reaches the individual: man as self-creating value-giver — Ockham’s divine will, democratized.
The Therapeutic Turn · Freud; Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1966
- Human nature psychologized: identity is inner feeling; “psychological man” succeeds political and religious man.
- Repression, not sin, becomes the enemy; authenticity the master virtue; morality collapses into self-actualization.
- Institutions are re-tasked from forming the self to affirming it; the sexual self becomes the core of identity (Trueman).
Transgenderism & the Late Liberal Order · Self-Identification as First Principle
- Anti-essentialism completed: “man” and “woman” become self-designations — names without natures; the body, raw material for the will.
- Self-identification is the seat of authority; the will now defines even the body’s meaning; dissent is reclassified as harm.
- Ockham’s move universalized: universals gone and will supreme, moral order fragments into rival sovereign selves — MacIntyre’s interminable disagreements.
When universals became names, morality lost its anchor in nature and migrated to will: first God’s will (Ockham, the Reformers), then the sovereign’s (Hobbes), then the individual’s (Locke, Kant, Mill), and at last the self-creating self’s (Nietzsche, the therapeutic age). On this reading, transgenderism is not an anomaly of late liberalism but its terminus: the name as the reality, the body as material, the will as the only law.
The 16th-century joint is contested: Luther repudiated Biel’s soteriology outright, and Calvin dismissed a lawless potentia absoluta as a profane fiction. The genealogy runs through voluntarism, desacralization, and the fracturing of interpretive authority — not through doctrinal inheritance.
PRINCIPAL TREATMENTS · Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948) · Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology (1963) · Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) · MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) · Taylor, A Secular Age (2007) · Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008) · Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (2012) · Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020)