This explains how anthropology, or in any case the discussion of anthropological themes, became so fundamentally important to the public life of the modern age. For, just as the Christian religion had been the basis for the spiritual unity of society in the days before the internal division of Christianity and the horrors of the confessional wars, so from the seventeenth century on, a shared conception of the human person, human values, and human rights became the basis for social coexistence. It