The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis, Princeton University Press, 2025, pp. xviii + 491, $31.96 hardcover.
The West: The History of an Idea is more the history of the usage of the phrases “the West” and “Western civilization.” This usage, as Varouxakis establishes, has been somewhat amorphous since its coinage in the early nineteenth century. It tends to refer to the Western part of Europe, perhaps with America and the other European settler colonies attached; it tends to refer to a cultural-intellectual complex; it tends to be attached to one or another political-intellectual project within the West. Varouxakis, a professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London, is not much concerned with the actual nature of the West, supposing it exists; his book rather catalogues a range of writers’ invocations of the West and scants evaluation of the truth of their contentions. The West, therefore, has philological-etymological interest, but not the historical consequence of a direct analysis of the nature and/or existence of the West.
Varouxakis, complementing the work of Stanley Kurtz’s The Lost History of Western Civilization (2019) engagingly demolishes the contention of some recent scholars that “the West” was invented either as a racializing justification of European imperialism in the age of Kipling or as an organizing principle for Columbia University’s Core Curriculum during and after World War One.1 While the phrase had earlier invocations such as Gibbon’s description of the Western Roman Empire and the successor kingdoms of the Latin West, Varouxakis traces the modern origin of the phrase and idea above all to the French philosopher Auguste Comte and associated French and German intellectuals in the early nineteenth century. Comte’s West was France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Britain, and he associated it with a description of civilizational uniqueness and a quasi-mystical, illiberal republicanism a far cry from take up the Western man’s burden—and also a far cry from the West is the spirit of liberty. “The West” was never merely descriptive: it was born as a semi-naïve assertion of French primacy within the West and as a political project.
It was also born to replace other labels that seemed insufficient. “Christendom” no longer satisfied, both because of the divisions within Christendom and because, after the French Revolution, religious faith no longer unified. “Europe” was too amorphous—a geographical expression that included the Ottoman Empire and Parliamentary Britain could have no essential unity. Previous writers had divided Europe between (more advanced) North and (less advanced) South—but Varouxakis provides substantial evidence that “the West” was coined not least to exclude Northern Russia, tyrannical and backward, from membership in the exclusive club centered on Paris. Mystical republicanism might hope to succeed within the smaller ambit of the West; it could not hope to make way anytime soon in the larger realms of Europe, the Christendom, or even the North.
Varouxakis traces the promulgation of the idea of the West beyond its original Franco-German Comtean circle. The British slowly adopted it through the nineteenth century; so, even more slowly, did Americans, who already had a West of their own beyond the Appalachians, and who had to be persuaded that they were a part of a larger West rather than a revolutionary break from Europe. Various peoples on the borderlands of the West articulated conflicting opinions about the West’s nature, where exactly its borders were located, and whether they wanted to be part of it: Varouxakis spends some time discussing the Greeks, the Russians, and black Americans. The West had become a familiar, if not omnipresent, part of the intellectual furniture of the West by 1914.
The twentieth century witnessed a vast increase in the term’s usage.2 The World Wars and the Cold War occasioned much of this increase. The wars between Germany and the Western powers brought about much discussion of the nature and the borders of the West—with America increasingly dragooned into the West, as an essential prop and/or commander of the Western alliance and (consequently) Western civilization. The Cold War brought about further invocations of the West, Plato to NATO, to underwrite the American-led coalition opposing the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire. Writers such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee popularized the use of the term “the West,” frequently with a pessimistic glance to the West’s future, within this context of bitter and enduring conflict within Europe.
After 1945, Russian-occupied Central and East Europeans mourned their status as the Captive West; while Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans meditated upon their ambivalent, frequently hostile relations with the West, both civilizational ideal and imperial dominium. The waning of the Cold War and the following generation saw the West transmuted into internal polemic: cultural conservatives (broadly speaking) working to preserve the West against the liberals-to-radicals they took now to be destroying the West, and those liberals-to-radicals increasingly straying from a claim that their Enlightenment-derived ideals characterized the West to a condemnation of the West as metonymy for racist oppression. Varouxakis concludes by saying that Enlightenment ideals might be more universally persuasive if they adopted some more generic label than “Western”—and noting that the Russia-Ukraine War has revivified the use of “the West” to rally support for a political-military project within Europe, with the irony that the West now appears to stretch remarkably far eastward, to Kiev and Kharkov.
Varouxakis’ general thesis seems persuasive—that the “West” has been a polemical term throughout, that the polemics generally were intra-European, and that they were arguments of weakness and aspiration as much as arguments of strength. Varouxakis’ thesis rests, however, upon scattered, perhaps arbitrarily selected source materials from the last two centuries. Less arbitrarily, he has selected his materials from those writers who interest a historian of political thought; for a very notable example, he does not cite Tolkien, whose paeans to the West and the Men of the West surely would deserve a place in a broader cultural history of the concept of the West. Varouxakis is provisionally persuasive; another author might well use different sources to paint an unlike portrait.
Yet Varouxakis is persuasive in good measure because he does not address the actual debate which the phrase “the West” precipitated—the anthropological, historical, and cultural nature of the West, its borders, and what political project follows from these definitions. Varouxakis describes the contours of the debate, but mostly does not take part in it—and by the framework of his approach, implicitly argues that what is at stake is nothing more than word-play for evanescent polemical purposes. Even those who hate the West grant that its existence and nature are of consequence. Varouxakis mentions the Straussian critique of modernity, a historicizing relativization that has killed the Western spirit; the Straussians would justly take Varouxakis to exemplify what they take has gone wrong with the West. The concern for words that disregards and then ostracizes the search for truth—postmodernism is the latest variant of this deformation, but it is modern, it is sophistry. As with all such exercises of modern scholarship, it will disappoint readers who prefer to discuss what the West is, rather than just discuss how the West is talked about.
Varouxakis’ work is professional, informative, and illuminating. But his approach ultimately is trivializing, and hence trivial. Or, more charitably: it is a prolegomenon to a discussion of the reality of the West.
David Randall is director of research at the National Association of Scholars, 13 W 36th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10018; randall@nas.org. His most recent books are The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation (2018) and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought (2019). Randall’s review “Is Western Civilization Even Real?” of Giorgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea appears in the current issue of AQ.
1 Stanley Kurtz, The Lost History of Western Civilization (National Association of Scholars, 2019), https://www.nas.org/reports/the-lost-history-of-western-civilization.
2 “Western civilization,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Western+civilization&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3.