The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis, Princeton University Press, 2025, pp. 491 $39.95 hardcover.
Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, Jürgen Osterhammel, translated by Robert Savage, Princeton University Press, 2018, pp. 676, $35.00 hardcover.
Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Yale University Press, 2025, pp. 330, $32.50 hardcover,
Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Robert Irwin, Princeton University Press, 2019, pp. 243, $18.95 softcover.
One of the unique features of Western civilization is that it has studied foreign cultures in a way and to a depth that had never been attempted before. Four books illuminate this history.
Varouxakis’s The West is, as he says “a history of the idea of the West” (352), of the terminology in which it has been expressed, and of the many contexts in which it has been applied, e.g. the Cold War. It is a monumental undertaking. Since it has been thoroughly reviewed in the Winter 2025-26 issue of this journal, I shall limit my discussion to two matters which I believe Varouxakis has missed or to which he has given insufficient weight.1
At several points, Varouxakis discusses black American writers and activists, more particularly their response to the legally enforced discrimination to which they were subjected in much of the United States as late as the 1960’s. They properly complained that their treatment did not live up to the values and standards expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. He also notes that the criticism sometimes turned into an anti-Western ideology, expressed in Marcus Garvey’s back to Africa movement and in claims that the valued elements of Western civilization were actually stolen from black Egyptian civilization, or were not really all that valuable. However, he does not deal at all with a similar movement dealing with American Indians.
This movement became explicit and articulate in the 1920s, as expressed by a group of non-Indian artists and writers living in the Southwestern United States and centered around Taos Pueblo. Mabel Dodge Luhan was the central figure, but even a partial list of the individuals clustered around her shows the extent of her influence on the intellectual life of the Western world: Carl Jung, Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Edmund Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Leopold Stokowski, Martha Graham, and D.H. Lawrence. Luhan and her followers and sympathizers were attracted to the culture of the Pueblo Indians as a source of authentic spirituality and a relief from what they saw as the materialism, unsettlement, and spiritual emptiness of Western civilization and the white race. One of her sympathizers, John Collier, became the Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs under President Franklin Roosevelt, where he proceeded to carry out a plan to preserve the Indians’ traditional spirituality from the profaning influence of the American middle class, by strengthening the legal status and financing of the Indian tribes. This version of indigenismo weakened in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but returned with a vengeance beginning in the 1960’s. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the ideology currently being taught in American colleges and universities and repeated in the press.
Varouxakis also discusses the appearance in the first half of the twentieth century of the comparative civilizations approach to history and anthropology, as expressed in the writings of Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, F.S.C. Northrop, A. L. Kroeber, Pitrim A. Sorokin, and Albert Schweitzer, among others. Varouxakis notes that Spengler and Toynbee achieved temporary international recognition, both popular and scholarly, but their ranging over such a huge area of research invited criticism from specialists, and their current influence is minimal. Most of these individuals attempted to apply their findings to contemporary cultural and political issues, and offered public policy recommendations based on their superior understanding of the movement of history. The supposed existence of a crisis was a common theme justifying such advice. The legitimate criticisms of their public policy advice, their biological metaphors and cyclical obsessions, as well as their sometimes melodramatic rhetoric, tended to discredit their whole approach, which may be unfair. The possible validity and fruitfulness of the comparative civilizations approach is a huge topic, which I cannot begin to discuss here. However, that approach offers a useful balance and corrective to the contemporary academic fads of cultural materialism and the Marxist version of cultural evolution. Certainly A.L. Kroeber, for example, knew far more history and anthropology than Marx and Engels did, and handled that knowledge in a much less dogmatic fashion.
Osterhammel’s book incorporates a stupendous amount of research on what he calls the long eighteenth century (ca. 1680 to 1830), in which European travelers, traders, merchants, missionaries, and diplomats entered realms of Asia hardly known before by Europeans, and left accounts, sometimes original, detailed, and rigorous ones, of what they found. These accounts, in turn, found their way into the writings of European historians and social philosophers to an extent that Asian ways of life became staples of European thought.
I cannot pretend to anything like Osterhammel’s knowledge of the sources that he deploys, but I must disagree with some of the strictures that he directs against Europeans’ supposed sense of their own superiority. This sense emerges, according to him, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning in the Napoleonic era, when, as he says, “From now on, Asia needed to be ruled or schooled, lectured and hectored, exploited or reconnoitered.” (517) No doubt these activities went on, but were there no balancing or offsetting considerations? It would be hard to imagine a more egregious example of Western imperialism, as Osterhammel imagines it, than Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, his routing of the local Mameluke forces, his ruthless sacrificing of his own forces, and his sudden, secret flight abandoning his men to the enemy British. However, Napoleon’s troops were accompanied by approximately 160 savants (artists, inventors, natural scientists) who braved conditions as dangerous as those faced by their armed colleagues. They found, investigated, measured, mapped, and depicted ruins in which no one had displayed an interest for centuries, often contending with garbage, debris, dust, and bat guano, in addition to hostile Egyptians. The result was a magnificent work of scholarship in the Description of Egypt (Description de l’ Égypt) in twenty-three (later thirty-three) volumes that virtually originated Egyptology as a discipline.
In the course of repairing a Turkish fort to repel English attacks, a French officer noticed that a stone previously incorporated into the fort contained a trilingual inscription, one language of which (ancient Greek) he could read. The Rosetta Stone, as it came to be called, provided the key to the ancient Egyptian language and writing, and thereby the recovery of the records of one of the world’s earliest civilizations, previously lost. The decipherment came through the cooperation and friendly competition of French and English scholars, whose countries had recently been military enemies and ideological antagonists.
A second counterexample to Osterhammel’s critique comes to mind. The British colony of India (modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) contained abundant unexplored ruins and other archaeological remains, including those of a civilization now known as Indus or Harappan. In the middle of the nineteenth century, English army officers began to notice the huge mounds of that civilization and to collect a few seals that showed a previously unknown script. Initial small excavations in the 1870’s were followed, in the 1920’s, by much more extensive excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India’s Director John Marshall and his Indian staff. Unlike Egypt, this was a completely unknown civilization whose investigation will require a substantial revision of our understanding of the early history of the Near and Far East.
Our third book, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, takes a different direction. Appiah believes that the idea of “the West” is incoherent (246) and elsewhere he refers to his philosophy as cosmopolitanism. He discusses in detail the works of Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, on the definition of religion, the fundamental characteristics of all religions (if there be such things), and the comparative study of the varieties of religious traditions, from band and tribal religions to the sophisticated, elaborate religions of the world’s major literate civilizations. I cannot claim to have Appiah’s expertise, but the summaries seem to me fair and balanced. Appiah avoids criticizing some of the more question-begging assumptions of his authors, such as Tylor’s claim that the science of culture is a reformer’s science (61) or Durkheim’s choice of Australian aboriginal totemism as the most primitive, fundamental, and definitive religion (85-90): “totalizing totemism” in Appiah’s phrase. Tylor’s reformer’s scientist would point out to his contemporaries how much of their cherished institutions are “survivals,” analogous to vestigial organs in biology, which serve no function in contemporary society and therefore should be discarded.
This is presumptuous in a number of ways. Is it not likely that many modern practices and institutions that served some function in the past have been transferred to another context where they serve another function? Think of the way we understand “art,” as opposed to Renaissance, Greek, Egyptian, or tribal “art,” all of which we accept as “art.” Tylor’s contemporary Walter Bagehot, who did not have Tylor’s range of knowledge, but who saw more deeply into the things that he did know, distinguished between the “dignified” and the “efficient” part of the English constitution, the dignified being chiefly the monarch and all of his or her trappings. Anyone who has watched a royal coronation, wedding, or funeral has seen the dignified part in all of its glorious archaicisms. Would nothing of value be lost if these were done away with? Is there not some value to having a nominal head of state who is not a politician?
As for Durkheim, to select the most primitive version of an institution as the key to understanding it and the basis for its definition needs justifying. The ancient Greeks would probably have taken precisely the opposite approach. Appiah discusses and seems to approve of Weber’s approach to definition: “Definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study.” (231) The comparative study of law, with which I am more familiar, shows the wisdom of Weber’s approach. Foreign cultures exhibit practices, such as forms of dispute resolution, that seem to function like what we regard as law, but present a very different surface, and others that at first glance are law-like but operate to a very different set of goals. Does the blood feud and its ideology, along with its limitations and resolutions, qualify as law? Do the non-judicial dispute resolution practices of California cattlemen or Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants qualify as law? Similar considerations apply to any broad cultural category. Knowing the range of variation in what you initially regard as one institution helps to define the subject of your study.
Appiah’s discussion of post-Weber writers is much less satisfactory. Robert Bellah and Clifford Geertz are only mentioned (14), and Mircea Eliade is ignored. What he calls “critical and cognitive turns” (203-226) contain some useful, if speculative, insights, but never really come to grips with religious institutions or practices. His discussion of the writing on religion before Tylor (Feuerbach, Comte, and others) is helpful in pointing out the problems in isolating religion as an aspect of society or culture to be studied. He asserts that the sociology of religion emerged as an aspect of the process of secularization (115, 212-213), which seems plausible, but I tend to see it as an expression of the religious tolerance that was not achieved until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Previously, one could study Greek or Roman paganism as part of a liberal education, but taking a serious cross-cultural or comparative view of religion, and expressing it publicly, was regarded as offensive or dangerous.
Our fourth book, Irwin’s Ibn Khaldun, is actually two books pursuing different purposes. The first is a survey of Ibn Khaldun’s life and works, particularly The Muqaddimah, which attempts to portray them as the thought of the fourteenth century North African religious judge and teacher that Ibn Khaldun undeniably was. I am no Arabist, and I cannot evaluate the accuracy of Irwin’s presentation, but he clearly makes a serious attempt to explain this representative of a foreign civilization to modern readers in a way that does not deny or obscure that civilization’s very foreignness.
The second book, the one of principal interest here, addresses the revival of Ibn Khaldun’s thought in modern Western scholarship. His thought was largely lost to the Arabic world, and it was only in the Ottoman Empire, and in Turkish translation, that he was studied after his death. The situation changed, beginning in the eighteenth century, when French (and later German, English, and American) authors began to study The Muqaddimah: to read, to compare manuscript copies, to translate, to annotate, and to comment on and evaluate the quality of the work. In a chapter entitled “The Strange Afterlife of The Muqaddimah” (162-203), Irwin discusses this scholarship and also the attempt to incorporate this work into the stream of modern Western social thought. To turn Ibn Khaldun into a simple precursor of Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Toynbee, or Strauss inevitably distorts his thought, especially as it ignores the basis of that thought in the Qur’ran, Sharia law, the world’s sinfulness and God’s punishment, and the role of the supernatural and the occult. Irwin points out the solecism involved in assimilating Ibn Khaldun’s thought to history (in the modern sense), economics, anthropology, or political science. But surely this distortion is part of taking some of his efforts seriously and treating them with respect, such as his discussion of the complementary roles of urban and nomadic ways of life.
The supposed distortion or misunderstanding is a change of context for Ibn Khaldun’s thought, a process of placing it in a new and different succession of thought, for which some of his ideas (such as the urban-nomadic contrast) take on new significance, while others (such as Sharia law) are neglected or lost. Ibn Khaldun is thus being used in a way he could not have anticipated. He becomes something different from what he previously was. Is it not at least possible that adopting or adapting Ibn Khaldun’s thought to the Western tradition of political thought will in some ways improve that tradition?
This process is far from unique. The moderns who have studied Aristotle as a source of insight or inspiration used his analysis of the Greek city state in a way, and for a purpose, that he could hardly have anticipated. The American founders who deployed “the celebrated Montesquieu” as a source for arguments for their proposed federalism (or against it) were, in some ways, misunderstanding or misrepresenting Montesquieu’s thought, or more accurately, transforming it, and of course Montesquieu did the same for his sources. What Irwin views as a misunderstanding is, in truth, a testament to the interest in and sympathy for a representative of a foreign culture. The fact that in the twentieth century, Arab authors have borrowed back Ibn Khaldun as a “Western cultural reexport” (189) shows that Western ways of thinking and research have become what Naipaul calls “our universal civilization,” available to anyone who wishes to take advantage of it and to participate in it. Many, of course, do not, and even many of its inheritors are hostile to it or apologetic concerning it.
The West has been unique in its eagerness to study foreign cultures and its willingness to sympathize with them. At the same time it has often been critical of its own practices. Aron said that “The true ‘Westerner’ is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to criticize it and the chance it offers him to improve it.”2 This sentiment may be a little austere; we cannot all be expected to lead the examined life. We might legitimately tolerate the popular trivialities and frivolous entertainments that surround us, as Burke said, “not from love of them, but for fear of worse.” The tolerance is the price we pay for the greater achievements that are surveyed in the four books just reviewed.
James W. Springer is a retired attorney; jamesspringer833@gmail.com. He is the co-author with Elizabeth Weiss of Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University of Florida Press 2020). Springer last appeared in AQ with “The Deceitful Misnomer: Settler Colonialism,” a review essay on Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism and Margaret D. Jacobs’s After One Hundred Winters in the summer 2025 issue.
1 David Randall, “Is Western Civilization Even Real?” Academic Questions 38, No. 4 (2025-2026): 94-97.
2 Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1962), 57.