originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth
… Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
… Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
Egalitarianism in particular jumps out as an odd entry in that list, since anatomically modern humans probably spent most of their evolutionary history in hunter-gatherer bands appreciably more egalitarian than sedentary civilizations.