The most common criticism of the West as a term questions its use to designate a single and unified power or geopolitical entity. As a term, the West (and its variants such as Western civilization, Western society, etc.) appeared surprisingly recent. Inventing the West P.1.

It seems most comprehensive and productive to think of it as a concept but understood specifically. Because the West, in all the forms identified in the literature review, is to be distinguished from the ordinary uses of the west as a direction and relative location and the poetic imagery that traditionally has been derived from these uses. What kind of category is the West, and when and why did it become fundamental for intellectual discourse? Inventing the West P.2.

Therefore, as an ideal-type construct, the West's concept gathers imaginary geography, a geopolitical being, a historical destiny, and a commitment to a unique set of values. Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Multiculturalism. Inventing the West P.3.

According to the premises of conceptual history, older terminology involving the west needs to be translated rather than be assumed to be equivalent to contemporary references to the West. At the same time, the concept and the term do not need to be the same: just as the term can exist without the concept, the concept can exist without the term. The West might merely be equivalent to the Roman Occident, to Christendom, and Europe. It might be a double of Indo-European culture, white civilization, the Western Hemisphere, capitalism, or modernity itself. The true history of the West as a concept would be; therefore, a history of all these other concepts, not to mention the whole framework of historicism in modem thought. Inventing the West P.4.

Through nineteenth-century Russian debates over that country's relation to Europe, the various strands of discourse were crystallized, enriched, complicated, and strengthened, such that the West became a fundamental mode of making sense of world history and geopolitics in the twentieth century. Inventing the West P.5.

According to the Slavophile Vision Russia had a civilizing mission. Inventing the West P.6.

By now, the West was transformed from merely a  political-geographic term to a political and social concept through the theorizing of Russian intellectuals about the relation of their country to Europe. As a concept, that is, as a mode of generalization and explanation, the West was used as a counter-ideal or ideal other of Russia. As such, it mimicked other dichotomies of nineteenth-century thought: between civilization and culture, the mechanistic and organic, the French and the German, the traditional and the modern. Inventing the West P.7.

This mood of cultural estrangement caused many to look to Russia for an alternative mode of being, and as a consequence took on the categories of the Russian discourse concerning the West. While Russian thought was not the sole "cause" of the West, its tremendous impact on German intellectuals in the first decade of the twentieth century, as described by Robert Williams and Steven Marks, helps explain why a multitude of different modes of categorization suddenly crystallized into the single concept of the West. It also helps to explain why the concept of the West, no matter what its content, always involves the question of its end, and why, from the beginning, it has been the source of negative Occidentalism. As a result, intellectuals in the West have engaged in a cultural critique of the West as if it names something alien to them, and as if, in relation to it, they are merely passive observers. The original Russian use of the concept to make a  sharp distinction between the Slavonic world and the European, and to evaluate that distinction, also accounts for the general use of the West to delineate and rank cultures. Inventing the West P.8.

 

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