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During the Reformation, the great debate was about free will rather than universal basic income. All over sixteenth-century northern Europe—from England, Belgium, and Germany to Swiss cities such as Geneva, Basel, and Zurich—the conversation was about the role of human agency. It pitted Renaissance figures like Erasmus, More, and Holbein against populist preachers like Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, the Swiss priest who initiated the Reformation in Zurich. It was a debate, you’ll remember, between humanists who believed that we have freedom to shape our own histories and those religious fanatics who believed in the existentially disempowering idea of predestination.
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