In the intellectual tradition now designated as "Western," there is no literature before the late nineteenth century analyzing a civilization, culture, society, or political alliance, called the West. As we found out, there are no books describing the relation of the West to the rest of the world, nor prophesying its decline, nor narrating its historical development, nor constructing a university curriculum or a course of reading based on its books. The West as a theoretical tool is thus a phenomenon little over a century old within "Western thought" itself (although it had emerged elsewhere somewhat earlier as we shall see.)

What is surprising as well, the West as a category has received little attention, despite its being a fundamental term of useage and despite the range of its meanings. Thus Jan Ifversen wrote in his 2004 "Who are the Westerners?": Compared to the impressive amount of studies on the concept of Europe, the concept of Africa or that of the Orient, very little is written on the concept of the West. We can find many works on the idea of the West. But they typically deal with the core values of the West and do not question the chosen term or venture into more semantic reflections. (4-5)

Assumed as given, the West has remain almost unnoticed in dictionaries of social and political ideas, rarely appears in indices of books, and typically is not featured in series examining critical vocabulary. 1

Yet there are some recent signs that this situation is changing. For example, while Raymond Williams does not have an entry on the West in the original 1976 version of his Keywords, it appears in the revised edition of 1985; the author claims that "now" it has interesting uses (333).2 A new awareness of the West as a theoretical object is signaled more strongly by the 2005 New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, where it is the object of a substantial entry by Naoki Sakai and Meagan Morris, who call it "a fairly recent mythical construct," and observe that "the unity that [the term] affirms has increasingly been challenged in recent decades" (38). Likewise Luisa Passerini argues in her 2002 discussion of the idea of Europe, "From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities ofIrony," that "the concept of 'The West,' which includes Europe and North America and particularly the United States, is ambiguous and conflictual. For this reason it deserves further investigation in order to clarify the aporiae and contradictions that historically have been at the base of the European identity" (202).

But these are still exceptions. Because there is little awareness that the West is a recent mode of conceptualization, scholars use the term in ways that very often produce anachronistic readings, for they impute it to older texts without being conscious of the need for semantic or conceptual translation.

Perhaps now is the time to ask about the West. In the last decade or so, there have been increasing indications that the usefulness of the idea of the West is being questioned."What is the 'West'?" is now being asked with greater frequency, within and without the academy that is. Still, most who pose it, such as Jeffrey Hart in an article of that title, lack awareness of the problematic nature of the term. When he asks "What is the 'West'?", he means: what is the essence of the West, what is the best way of describing it "that would reach deeply into the unique essence of the Western mind, explaining, at least in part, the astounding success and transforming energy that have made the West supreme among the various powers of the earth" (1)? Hart's project therefore is continuous with the voluminous literature on the West that intends to explain its unique characteristics, its dominant role in world history, and its pre-eminent position among world cultures. The question of the West's superiority is inseparable from the concept of the West itself it seems(and something we woll discover further below). To ask the question, however, is not to be conscious of the West as a conception; indeed, to ask the question seems precisely to foreclose such self-consciousness. How Hart poses the question must be distinguished, therefore, from the approach of a growing number of commentators who are examining the usefulness or validity of essentializing ideas about the West, such as Hart's own notion of "the unique essence of the Western mind."

A critical examination of the category, therefore, must be distinguished from a critical analysis of the West's nature. The real counterpart to Hart's project of identifying the inner meaning of the West's unique success would be the project of identifying the inner meaning of the West's unique evil, which poses such questions as according to Hitchens: "What is it in the Western soul that thrills to violence and authority and fanaticism?" (Hitchens D7). Serge Latouche's 1996 The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope, and Limits of the Drive Towards Global Uniformity is a good example of such anti-Westernism (or, sometimes, "Occidentalism"). Latouche argues that, while any analysis of Westernization requires "at least a hypothetical sketch of the essence of the West" (25), this essence cannot be found within its geography, religion, philosophy, race, economy, or culture.

Instead: there emerges a face unlike any known to us and which must infallibly astonish or even frighten us: a very monster, half-mechanic, half-organic, which fits none of our categories for the definition of species. The West appears to us a living machine whose components are human beings, who give it its life and strength but from whom it is autonomous: it moves through time and space at the dictates of its own fancy. (26)

Other endeavors to uncover the malign nature of the West include: Jalal Al Ahmad's Occidentosis: The Plague from the West, written in the early 1960s, which, as the title  suggests, treats Western culture as a disease infecting Iran and Islam generally; Couze Venn's 2000 Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity, which considers the West as driven by the imperialism of the Same; and David Rurst's Westernism: an Ideology's Bidfor World Dominion, which argues that "Westernism" is an ideology of secular humanism competing for domination against other ideologies but carrying within itself the seeds of cultural corruption (3).

Whether celebrating or lambasting the West, these works seek to identify its essential spirit without assessing its value as a category. I will argue that what I call "critical accidentalism" departs from this style of cultural criticism by its refusal to accept suchshort-circuiting of critique, and by its demand that the West instead be analyzed as a

theoretical construct. The rest of the part assesses those works which either lay the groundwork for, or demonstrate a critical Occidentalist approach to, the meaning of theWest. They belong to a diversity of fields, and, rather than constituting a coherent literature of scholarship, they are united mainly by their individual authors' common endeavor to bring the West into question.

The Political West

The most common criticism of the West as a term questions its use to designate a single and unified power or geopolitical entity. For example, Owen Harries argues in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article "The Collapse of 'The West'," that the ''political West" was synonymous with those countries belonging to NATO (even though NATO identifies itself as ''North Atlantic" rather than Western), and it has now lost its usefulness:

Over the last half century or so, most of us have come to think. of "the West" as a given, a natural presence and one that is here to stay. It is a way of thinking that is not only wrong in itself, but is virtually certain to lead to mistaken policies. The sooner we discard it the better. The political "West" is not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile "East" to bring it into existence and to maintain its unity. It is extremely doubtful whether it can now survive the disappearance of that enemy. (41-2)

Harries believes that the West still can name a common civilization, but not a geopolitical entity. During the twentieth century, it had been employed as a description of political alliances in the contexts ofWWI, WWII, and the Cold War. Some of these alliances excluded nations Harries considers culturally Western, such as Germany, and they glossed over important differences and animosities, including those felt by European nations towards each other and those felt by Europe towards the United States (48). Now, at the end of the Cold War, America has found its interests diverging from those of Europe, and it has embraced unilateralism as its foreign policy. Harries concludes that the West is "a concept of the last resort," and that it will not be needed until there is another common enemy. This echoes Agnes Heller's claim already in 1991 that "the most superficial investigation shows that the conceptual and geopolitical myth of the West has lost its validity now that communism has collapsed" (qtd. in Gress 485).

More recent commentators on foreign policy have likewise argued that shifting international relations, especially in the context of September 11, have undermined the  usefulness of the term. Examples include: Alexander Rise, in his "What is this thing we call the West?," written in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001; Gwynne Dyer, in his 2004 "'The West' an Idea Whose Time is Gone"; and Niall Ferguson, in his 2005 "The Widening Atlantic." All of them question the future possibility, and thus the enduring nature, of a "political West" that is a geopolitical alliance consonant with Western civilization or culture. More evidence that the unity of the West is no longer being taken for granted can be discerned in the founding, in 1997, of a Center for the Study of America and the West by the American Foreign Policy Research Institute. The purpose of the Center is "to relate the teaching of history to issues of American and Western identity," and it issues a bulletin called "Watch on the West" to comment on "the meaning of the West; the role of religion in shaping Western values and American international attitudes; the West as a political entity; and the West as an influence on American foreign policy." Its main concerns are with the future of what began as an anti­-totalitarian alliance between the United States and Western European powers, and with defining enduring Western values.

Others, however, go farther, raising more profound questions concerning the status of the idea of Western civilization. Such contemporary critiques of the images, ideas, and myths about the West have often been inspired by a prior and more substantial critical literature examining received categories of culture and space as Eurocentric. Stuart Hall and other cultural theorists argue that the conventional terms of Western culture necessarily generate "Others" and thus depend upon the construction of a "constitutive outside" ("Who Needs Identity?" 4-5).

And ofcourse then there is Edward Said's Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient, first published in 1978.

But while Orientalism questions the category of the Orient as an Other through which the West has apparently defined itself, it does not equally question the category of the West. Said writes of the West as if it were a real entity, an intentional agent that for its entire history objectified Others in order to strengthen its identity and self-regard. In his calling for the deconstruction of the construct of the Orient, he assumes that the West has acted as a constructor, creating a false world in order to suppress or oppress what is outside of itself.

But this leads Said into an obvious contradiction. While accusing the West of essentializing the East, he equally essentializes the West. He argues, for example, that the West has made the Orient its "great complementary opposite since antiquity" (58), and that there is a "Western style for dominating" (3). As Dennis Porter observes in his "Orienta/ism and Its Problems," Said is thereby claiming the "continuity of representation between the Greece of Alexander the Great and the United States of President Jimmy Carter, a claim that seems to make nonsense of history at the same time as it invokes it with reference to imperial power/knowledge" (153). Said's essentialism leads him to ignore "in both Western scholarly and creative writing all manifestations of counter-hegemonic thought." 3

 Orientalism 's failure to employ the same critical apparatus to stereotypes of the West as it does to stereotypes of the East is replicated by many of Said's followers in postcolonial theory. For example, Ziauddin Sardar, in his 1999 Orientalism - a study that is part of the Open University's Concepts in the Social Sciences series - acknowledges the charge that Said has relied upon the kind of essentialism he ostensibly opposes. Sardar dutifully observes that "neither the West nor the Orient are monolithic entities: both are complex, ambiguous and heterogeneous," and that ''the West itself was not always 'The West'" (2).

Yet, in his own analysis, he does not treat the West as something that is actually "complex, ambiguous and heterogeneous," but instead as a singular entity whose character has been stable through time. He confidently identifies the motivations of all the Westerners who have written about the East as being desires for superiority and for appropriation (15). Sardar writes, for example, of ''the pathology of Oriental ism in the Western psyche" (1), based on the longing of the "Western male" for the temptations of the mysterious Oriental female, and of the will of the West as a whole towards the denigration and domination of the East (2). Because it is merely the expression of such pathological desires, "Orientalism then is the great lie at the centre of the Western civilization: a lie about the nature of the West and about the nature of the great cultures and civilization to the East of the West, a lie about Us and Them" (11). Although acknowledging that his history of Western representations of the East is only a partial and simplified one, then, Sardar asserts its essential truth: "But the detail would add little to the concluding point: underlying the complexity of the history of the West there is a continuity of stance to a necessary construct that is called the Orient" (52). While his theoretical commitments appear to necessitate a bow to heterogeneity, in practice Sardar presupposes a West that is homogenous in nature.

This contradictory treatment of the West is not untypical of postcolonial theory. Another example can be found in the work of Balachandra Rajan, who in his Under Western Eyes: Indiafrom Milton to Macaulay warns that "India and the West are enormous simplifications" (210), and yet who throughout the book writes of the West as if it were a unified agent (Hegel ''traces a psychological route that the West finds it difficult not to follow" [26]), and as if it were motivated by malign intentions ("An ambivalent construction of the Orient becomes necessary, in which Western morality can denounce what Western cupidity continues to desire"[43]).

Since the publication of Said's Orientalism, a whole literature has developed devoted to uncovering the operation of other imaginary geographies dependent upon the logic of binary oppositions. Larry WoUT's 1994 Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment argues that the idea of Eastern Europe was invented in the eighteenth century in order to construct the identity of Western Europe as being the true Europe. Maria Todorova analyzes the idea of the Balkans in the same light, arguing that the region has never been considered to be truly part of Europe and has always been subject to the same sets of Orientalizing stereotypes as other areas named Eastern or Asiatic; she calls this set of stereotypes "Balkanism." Similar arguments are made concerning "Byzantinism," which Dimiter Angelov defines as the "simplistic and negative assessment of Byzantine civilization and of the Byzantine legacy in southeastern Europe by historians, political scientists and publicists" (1). This style of critiquing. The meaning of European conceptions of space has in turn been criticized by the historian J.G.A. Pocock for its assumption that "constructed" or "invented" categories are necessarily the expressions of a hegemonic ideology. All geographical and political concepts are by definition constructions, Pocock argues, yet they also might be related to lived experiences that historians should attempt to understand and not merely judge ("Some Europes" 55-6). And, to extend Pocock's observationinto a question, doesn’t the equating of contruction with oppression seems to have blinded those who have discerned the West's constructions of Others to the possibility that the West might equally be constructed or invented?

In fact there is a habit of writing about the West as if it were an agent of oppression, imposing itself upon others by thinking of them as Others. Thus the Oriental, the Eastern, the Balkan, and the Byzantine are identities that are done by the West. But if the West is also constructed, who then would be the constructor?

This one-sidedness reveals itself even in a work that includes what appears to be the first systematic consideration of the West as a category. Stuart Hall's "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power," a chapter in the Open University 1992 text Formations of Modernity, holds that there is a direct relation between economic power and representation. Hall considers the West to be an "idea," one fundamentally synonymous with modernity, which has the special function of classifying, representing, comparing and evaluating other societies in order to rank them lower than the European (278). He argues that the production of the West occurred during the early modem period, and that it produced in turn an idea of "the modem" as Western domination. Unfortunately, Hall is not exact about what terms were used in the historical texts he cites, and thus he treats the West, modernity, and Europe as close synonyms. For example, when he discovers textual evidence for a growing sense of European identity in the early modem period, he takes this as evidence for a growing sense of Western identity (289).

Following the approach of Foucault, Hall identifies "the West and the Rest" as a "discursive formation" that produces meaning and social practices rather than an "ideology" that masks the true conditions of economic production (291). Hall claims, accordingly, that the discourse of the West cannot be reduced to mere economic interests.

Yet neither can it be treated as "innocent," for it acts as a form of domination over others (295). While complaining that the idea of the West employs stereotypes that split the world into the more and less valuable, Hall himself employs stereotypes that split the world into the dominating and the dominated.

Occidentalism

There is a recent literature on "Occidentalism," or on negative representations of the West, that brings into question discourse about the West, and not merely the discourse of the West. While Hall treats the West as a discursive formation that stereotypes others, this different approach examines how the West itself is stereotyped in contemporary political and social analysis. The 1995 collection, Occidentalism: Images of the West, edited by James Carrier, is the pioneering work of this literature. The contributors identify a number of ways in which essentialized images of the West operate in contemporary discourse both in Asia and the West. They argue that Western social scientists, particularly anthropologists, have denigrated Western culture in their attempts to engage with non-Western cultures, and that non-Western intellectuals have employed simplistic representations of the West in order to valorize local identities (viii-ix). In the 1997 New Literary History article "Orientalism versus Occidentalism?", Wang Ning  argues that; while Occidentalism is still an "indeterminate and problematic 'quasi­ theoretical' concept" and yet the object of specialized study, "its ghost has already been haunting" various "Oriental countries." Asian scholars indulge in Occidentalist stereotyping when they seek to characterize the Western as alien (62). But, given the interconnectedness of non- Western and Western academic life, treating the West as the East's Other imposes a false distinction between the two, Ning claims (66). But neith this author, nor the contributors to Occidentalism, question the legitimacy of the West as a category of analysis. Their critique is directed rather towards the set of negative representations or "stylized images" of the West that obtain in a number of discourses(Occidentalism 1).

In a more polemical style, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, in their 2004 Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, argue that Occidentalism expresses a powerful ideology of hatred towards the West, one that dehumanizes its object as much as Orientalism dehumanizes the East. The two authors trace Occidentalism' s intellectual origins principally to the German reaction against the French Enlightenment, but in addition to older European traditions of hostility towards the city. The views of various groups opposed to the West, including Russian Slavophiles, Nazis, Japanese nationalists, and radical Islamicists, have a common source in anti-modernism within the West itself. Present conflicts between the West and Islamicist groups such as Al-Qaeda do not therefore represent so much a "clash of civilizations" as a "cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas" (149).

Buruma and Margalit intentionally simplify history in order to highlight the dangers of historical over-simplification. They attribute the anti-Westerism they describe to feelings of hatred and humiliation, and therefore as lacking any intellectual justification. Despite their reluctance to acknowledge that criticisms of the West might be grounded in more than psychological states, the authors successfully demonstrate the interconnectedness between seemingly disparate national discourses, on the one hand, and fundamental differences within seemingly unified national discourses, on the other. While they correctly identify how the West has been used as a slogan for suspect political purposes, they themselves often come close to sloganeering by overstating the extent to which critics of Western (such as Dostoyevsky) would consider themselves, or should be considered by us, to be the West's "enemies" (98).

Robin D. Gill offers a more reflective and nuanced assessment of Occidentalism in his 2004 Orientalism and Occidentalism: Is the Mistranslation of Culture Inevitable? Gill shows the extent to which both those in the East and those in the West employ both Orientalist and Occidentalist stereotypes. He notes Said's binary opposition between the oppressive West and the oppressed East, for example, and criticizes it for serving to reinforce the notion of Oriental passivity. Gill's primary concern is the influence of what he calls a "negative Occidentalist" outlook in Japan, where, he argues, stereotypes about the West playa far more essential role in the formation of national identity than do Orientalist views in Western countries. As do the others who analyze Occidentalism, Gill wants to correct the ways in which the West has been misrepresented, but unlike them he includes both positive and negative ideas about the West as they are held by both Westerners and non-Westerners (54-56).

The West and History

Because historians should, and do, note the historicity of political vocabulary, it is not surprising that a number of professional historians have had a critical awareness of the West as an idea or term whose meaning has shifted over time. For some, the history of the term allows for a more precise definition; for some, it provides a neutral description of changing usage; and for others it demonstrates the West's status as a mere invention or myth. Among the fiercest critics of the West are a number of historians of Europe, who argue that the category has mainly exclusionary purposes. Professional historians have another motivation for their skepticism, for the West's meaning has been the central concern of well-known speculative philosophers of history in the twentieth century, such as Spengler and Toynbee.

Loren Baritz, in his 1960-61 American Historical Review article "The Idea of the West," traces the history of the poetic and religious meanings of the west as a direction, and how these influenced English and American perceptions of national identity. In the early modern period, the English took up the Roman theme of the westward "course of Empire" to affirm their own right to rule the New World. For the Puritans, America was the New Jerusalem in which God's light would now shine on humanity from the west (636), fulfilling His purpose for humanity and signaling the end of times. In the nineteenth century, the "opening" and settling of the West was the Manifest Destiny of the United States; Thoreau, for example, wrote that "only in America did the,west exist," because only in America could humanity be born anew (639). Baritz's history treats the cultural meaning of the direction of the west up through the nineteenth century rather than in the discourse of his contemporaries in the mid.twentieth century. Even so, his article uncovers some of the mythological and religious dimensions that still surround the West, especially in the United States.

Also in the American Historical Review in the early 1960s, Gerhard Masur's "Distinctive Traits of Western Civilization: Through the Eyes of Western Historians," presents an excellent overview of the history and nature of "universal history." The conception of universal history, in his view, has been inseparable trom the rise of historical consciousness, the latter being a distinctive trait of Occidental culture (591).

Historical consciousness arose directly from the Christianity of Western Europe, which thought of both humanity and time itself as purposeful wholes: the possibility of a philosophy of history depends upon the assumption that "the meaning of history is one, that it cannot be manifold, but must be single and unique" (593).4 Masur observes that, even though the philosophy of history has universal aims, it is actually "Europocentric," for it treats the West as the agent and locus of world-historical meaning. Even Herder, who wanted to give each world culture its due, "once more identified the history of the West with that of the world" (596).

Masur argues that "one can hardly speak of a history of Western civilization" prior to the eighteenth century, because the conceptualization of history that it involves was unavailable before that period; but he does not locate precisely when it did become available (592). One problem is that he fails to distinguish between the universal histories that were implicitly centered on European history and comparative histories of  civilizations that explicitly treated the history of Western civilization in distinction from all others. As a result, Mazur often attributes to various eighteenth- and nineteenth­ century figures conceptions that they did not have. For example, he makes the following claim: "Hence, in German thought we will not be surprised to find world history once more identified with Western civilization. 'The most eminent place of human culture and of national history is the Asiatic-European hemisphere,' says Friedrich Schlegel" (597).

But, given that the West depends upon a distinction the East, and that Europe depends upon a distinction from Asia, Schlegel's "Asiatic-European hemisphere" can hardly be considered to be equivalent to the West; it would be closer to what is currently meant by the Northern hemisphere. And, as I will see later, the use of "civilization" to signify a particular culture rather than a universal condition only began in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and there is no evidence in the quotation from Schlegel that he is employing it in that way. 5

David Gress, in his 1998 From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents, is seemingly more critical about the assumptions involved in the idea of the West than the previous two authors, and more interested in uncovering its specific history. The idea of the West most commonly found in higher education, Gress argues, involves a "Grand Narrative" connecting ancient Greek origins to modem science and liberal democracy through the progress of Great Books. This Grand Narrative of the West, as relayed by the traditional curriculum of American general education, is recent in origin, beginning with the cult of Greece in German Romanticism. It was only institutionalized in the American university during WW I, in order to forge a commitment of American soldiers to the European cause. Gress does not dispute that there is an entity called the West, but instead  that the Grand Narrative gives a correct account of its history. He wants to replace its incorrect emphasis on Hellenic sources with a true narrative of the West, one centered on European political conflicts during the Middle Ages. The West was forged out of the history of power struggles rather than any tradition of high culture. Thus: "The West was never a single entity that one could define neatly. . . various Wests coexisted, defined in terms of different principles, regions, beliefs, and ambitions. The West was not a single story, but several stories, most of which neither began with Plato nor ended with NATO"(16).

Even while acknowledging that "the West was never a single entity," Gress holds that there is a true West, and that this is now threatened by cultural corruption, engineered particularly by contemporary theorists. The attacks on the Western tradition by exponents of postmodernism and deconstruction, according to Gress, are derived from their "nihilism." Critical theory is merely destructive, the successor of the "radical Enlightenment's" triad of "rationalism, license, and self-gratification" (as manifested by the French Revolution's Terror). The authentic West, in contrast, finds expression in the "skeptical Enlightenment's" triad of "reason, liberty, and prosperity" (559).

Although Gress offers an apt description of the Grand Narrative, and a useful account of the origins of many of its assumptions, his own history is flawed. For one thing, he is anachronistic in his use of the West, to the point of mistranslating nineteenth-century texts, because he does not really consider the possibility that all our ideas concerning the West might be recent in origin. While he correctly observes that Spengler began writing just at the point where "Western elites were starting to recognize themselves as Western and not just as 'civilization' tout court, and were beginning to devise the Grand Narrative to explain and justify being Western" (74), he does not consider the implications of his own statement, namely that the West cannot be read farther back in time. While he helpfully analyzes the Grand Narrative of the West as the product of a certain moment in history (57), he does not consider that his own narrative has an historical provenance in the nineteenth-century ideology of Teutonism, which posited the centrality of the Germanic contribution to Europe. While he wants contemporaries to use the West in a more conscious fashion by understanding its history, he says that he disagrees with the historian Norman Davies's criticism of the idea of the West without answering any of his points. Gress's approach shows the weakness of thinking of the West as an "idea": the issue for him is only whether or not the idea is understood correctly. Gress even charges certain of those who have an "incorrect" idea of the West with malicious intentions and with promoting cultural corruption and nihilism.

Gress, therefore, is not a reliable historian of the concept of the West. On the other hand, his characterization of the standard history of the Western tradition as the Grand Narrative is a helpful one, and it will be used in this study. His critique of the Grand Narrative's claim that the ancient Greeks were the first Westerners, is also effective;Gress observes that, while the Hellenic culture is part of the legacy of Western civilization, so are a number of other cultures, including those of medieval Islam and China. He argues that "the West was more than the sum of these legacies, nor were the legacies necessarily representative of the civilizations that spawned them" (75).

Historians of world history, are also critical of received ideas about the West. The best known of these is William H. McNeill, who has attempted through his work to supplant the Eurocentric writing of history. In a later reflection on his 1963 The Rise of the West; a History of the Human Community, McNeill writes that in it he had intended "to turn Spengler and Toynbee on their heads": they both had treated civilizations as separate entities, and he had wanted to demonstrate that they were closely inter-related (Mythistory 57). On the other hand, McNeill still seems to couple world history with the progress of West em civilization, as the title of his famous book suggests. But he claims that he had not meant by this to celebrate the West's uniqueness as a source of cultural innovation. And, since then, he has become even more convinced of the historical prevalence of "ecumenical cosmopolitanism" rather than cultural autonomy (64).

In a 1997 article, "What We Mean by the West," McNeill explores the separate question of terminology. He notes that, as a direction, the west has had a number of quite different valuations attached to it (as described by Baritz, above), and that present uses have an enormous range of meanings: "What the West means in a given context, therefore, depends entirely upon who is invoking the term and for what purpose" (1). Nevertheless, the term always serves to make a demarcation for the sake of cultural self-definition.

Again, as does Gress, McNeill ends up claiming that there is an essential West despite its many possible meanings, and it is characterized by liberty. He argues that the political distinction of West from East originated in the Persian Wars, when the Greeks distinguished their freedom from the slavishness of the Persians. This ideal of freedom,''the republican spirit" (2), was then passed down to Rome, and then to Renaissance Italy.

The Italians, who employed ancient republican principles to counter current assertions of imperial and papal power, became the cultural leaders of their time, having as their project "nothing less than to organize the western promontory of the Eurasian landmass into a single, integrated market economy through commerce, specialized production ..." (3). While this ambition provoked the religious backlash of the Reformation, the technological accomplishments of the early modem period soon persuaded Europeans that they might be superior to both the ancients and hostile powers in the East. Finally, the torch of Western freedom was passed to the Anglo-French nations of the nineteenth century. Republican virtue made England and France so successful that others, both in Europe and outside, felt compelled to copy them: "And that, of course, was the essence of the West - the Anglo-French West - that imposed itself on the rest of the world between 1750 and 1914" (5). America during this period gradually advanced to the level of ''the core European West," but still felt itself to be separate culturally. It was WW I that caused the United States to identify with Anglo-French traditions, and the "Western Civ" course was born in American colleges. Its curriculum was later challenged by legitimate demands for a more inclusive world history, but McNeill argues that these were often "contaminated" by the multiculturalist doctrine that all cultures are equally important (6).

W orId history should concern itself with those unique "seats of innovation" that are dominant in anyone period; the most recent has been the West, but before that it was China, and now it looks as if innovation is moving outside the Western sphere. Yet conservatives who defend the West's superiority are as mistaken as multiculturalist liberals who denigrate its accomplishments (7): "So insofar as a concept of the West excludes the rest of humanity it is a false and dangerous model. Situating the West within the totality of humankind is the way to go" (8).

A more fundamental, yet less familiar, questioning of the assumptions behind the concept of the West is that of Marshall G.S. Hodgson, who was a contemporary of McNeill's at the University of Chicago, but who, unlike McNeill, published little in his own lifetime.

In essays collected in a posthumous collection of his writings entitled Rethinking World History, published in 1993, Hodgson criticizes the conceptualizations of culture that have caused civilizations closely connected with each other by the common "zone" of the Mediterranean to be treated as if they were isolated historically:

Western scholars, at least since the nineteenth century, have tried to find ways of seeing this Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization as composed of distinct historical worlds, which can be fully understood in themselves, apart from all others. Their motives for this have been complex, but one convenient result of such a division would be to leave Europe, or even Western Europe, an independent division of the whole world, with a history that need not be integrated with that of the rest of mankind save on the terms posed by European history itself. (9)

Yet all our modem serious attempts at understanding world history are based on all the assumptions of a series of distinct societies, distinct culture worlds, each with its own inner unity and with only external relations to the others.Universalizing efforts, such as that of Ranke, are only seeming exceptions, based on optical illusions which made Europe seem the world, and all other regions isolated and parochial. (10-11)

For Hodgson, the very terminology of the West is problematic. As early as 1944, he called for scholars to use East and West only with great care, because while the West or the Occident possibly does refer to a distinguishable civilization or society, the Orient does not (41). Over time the Orient has expanded from its original meaning - what was the east of Rome - to encompass many separate societies which are only unified by their not being Occidental (40). Thus, the problem with the usual way of writing about the West is not merely that it tends to disparage the Asiatic or Oriental, but even more that it accepts "the idea that the 'East' is one cultural entity complementary to that of Europe at all" (41). "Westernism" is the outlook informing the prevailing understanding of history, by which humanity is divided into the ahistorical Primitives, the static or regressive Orientals, and the dynamic and creative Occidentals (92). Everything historically dynamic therefore becomes typed as Western, and the Eastern is always typed as static (6-7).

In her contribution to a collection of papers first presented at a conference in 1985 devoted to the question "What Americans should know: Western civilization of world history?", Lynn Hunt questions the legitimacy of Western civilization as it is understood by American general education. Her "What is Western About Western Civilization?" proposes that the time is ripe for questioning the category of the West itself - but her call to re-think the West as an organizing principle of education would be little heeded in the "canon wars" that followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hunt observes that teaching "the Western tradition" in order to solidify cultural identity is oddly more of an American than a European endeavor (155), and she argues that the time has come to think  about why this is so, and .'to try to recapture the process by which we invented the Western tradition in the first place" (156). In the end, Hunt's project seems not so much to treat the West as a category that came into use at a certain time, but rather to be concerned with recovering the richness of its earlier content, especially to be found in the comparative study of civilizations undertaken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That is, she would like .to give the West more meaning by comparing it directly with other cultures, and not merely to assume that it is unique while paying no real attention to them. Like Gres‘s, McNeill, and Hodgson, therefore, Hunt calls for an understanding of the West that is more adequate to history.

The three previous historians think that the problem with the West it that it needs to be placed in a larger context. According to Hodgson, for example, that larger context is the Afro-Eurasian civilizational complex, within which Islam played an important role. But there are two historians of Europe who have identified the West as a problematical category altogether, and have disputed its legitimacy.

 

Searching for the West P.2

Bibliography and Works Cited

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