When did the West become a political concept?

When it comes to the concept of The West, its scope and principles have been criticized both contemporarily and historically. How did the West emerge as a coherent concept, and what has it meant over time?

Georgios Varouxakis is a Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London, where he is also the Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. He is also the author of several books, and his newest book is titled The West: The History of an Idea.

Greg and Georgios discuss Giorgios’s new book, 'The West: The History of an Idea,' and explore the origins, evolution, and various interpretations of the concept of 'the West.' Their conversation covers some popular misconceptions about the West, reasons behind its historical development, and the roles nations like Greece, Russia, and Ukraine have played in shaping the West's identity. Giorgios emphasizes how the West has been a flexible and evolving idea, open to new members and continuously redefined through history. 

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Episode Quotes:

The two myths of the West’s origins

03:06: The popular conceptions are that the West must have always existed. People take for granted that at least since the ancient Greeks, there is a West that has resisted the invasion of Asia through the Persian Empire and that in the Battle of Marathon, the West defined itself and defeated. A projection of things that people later imagined. In this sense, ancient Greeks saw themselves as Greeks. They did not see themselves as West or Europe or anything else. The other end of the spectrum is that the West must have begun with a Cold War, that surely the West is a creation of the post–First World War situation where the United States leads a group of peoples versus the Soviet Union, and that is the West. These are the two popular extremes. Popular conceptions that I consider, the two ends of the spectrum.

The West as an open-ended idea

17:14: The West had inherent from its inception an open-endedness that was not based on just ethnic descent or just religion.

Richard Wright: The gadfly of the West

37:14: [Richard Wright] says, "I'm Western, but I now realize I'm more Western than the West. I'm more advanced than the West. I believe in the Western principles and values, and constitutional and political and other philosophical ideas. I was taught, I believe in freedom of speech, separation of, and the of. These are not necessarily practiced much of the time by Western governments and elites. So he becomes literally like Socrates was the gadfly of Athenian democracy. Richard Wright becomes the gadfly of the West, saying, 'I'm criticizing you because you're not doing the Western thing. You're not Western enough.' Literally, he says, 'The West is not Western enough.'"

Why the West should be improved, not abolished

47:48: My argument is peoples and their leaderships make decisions, and they may change allegiances. They may adopt institutions, alliances, and cultural references that their ancestors did not have a century or two ago, come from a country that. An experiment in that these experiments may change. You know, things may change, but I do not think anytime soon Greece will join some Eastern or whatever alliance. So to the extent that what anyone can predict, the attractiveness of the West is exactly this combination of, and an entity. As we keep saying, it should be criticized and improved. So it is not abolishing the West that I would recommend, it is improving the West and making the West live up to more of its aspirations and principles.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• John Stuart Mill
• Auguste Comte
• Ottoman Empire
• Peter the Great
• Catherine the Great
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Ahmed Rıza
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Germaine de Staël
• Thomas Mann
• Francis Lieber
• Donald Trump
• Steve Bannon
• Oswald Spengler
• Western Civilization
• Walter Lippmann
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Richard Wright
• Francis Fukuyama

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Queen Mary University of London
• LinkedIn Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The West: The History of an Idea
• Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations
• Mill on Nationality
• Victorian Political Thought on France and the French
• PhilPapers.org Profile

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