#437 - How We Got "The West:" A Dialogue with Georgios Varouxakis

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Georgios Varouxakis about “the West.” They define the west, discuss different meanings and ideas about the west, and how western ideas came from the east. They also talk about “L’Occident,” impact of Christendom, separating Russia from the West, and Comte. They talk about whether Western values can exist without Christianity, WWI and WWII, the cold war, decline of the West, future of the West, and many other topics.

Georgios Varouxakis is Professor of the History of Political Thought and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at Queen Mary-University of London. He has a Masters in Legal and Political Theory at University College London (UCL) and a PhD in History at UCL. His work has concentrated on the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of political thought and intellectual history with a particular emphasis on international political thought, political thought on nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, empire, and the intellectual history of ideas of “Europe” and “the West”, as well as of attitudes towards the EEC/EU. He is the author of numerous books including the most recent, The West: The History of An Idea.

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