Y'know, it's been so long since I've read the book (and did such a bad job annotating it then) that I likely won't do it justice, BUT: Berman's main focus is how "the abstractions of seventeenth-century natural law collapse[d] in the eighteenth century's encounter with empirical reality." Empiricism revealed "Nature [to be] devoid of all normative content": Just atoms bouncing off of atoms.

But without the arguments of Natural Law, on what basis could one resist an oppressive social order? Berman interprets this question through Montesquieu's epistolary novel The Persian Letters: "Natural-law theory might vent moral indignation against Usbek [the titular Persian] for violating the rights of man; but he could dismiss such criticism as mere dogmatism, based on moral values imposed arbitrarily on his system from 'outside.' Montesquieu's own critique of a repressive society is much more complex. A repressive system, he argues, fails to fulfill its own immanent standard: It is incapable of satisfying any of its members, even the most privileged; precisely when it appears most stable, it is actually decomposing from within...No social system, Montesquieu tries to show, can provide human happiness, unless it posits, and its government guarantees, a basic human right: the right of every man *to be himself.*"

The discovery of this "basic human right" to self-discovery and -development both opens the door to the sort of atomized individualism necessary for capitalist modernity *and* authorizes resistance against the alienation this individualism causes by erasing the ground of community/interconnectedness on which individualism ultimately rests. From what I can tell, you may not come to the same conclusions and potential steps forward that Berman did, but I think the book makes a good attempt to explain how modern individualism developed.