A Short History of Western Ideology: A Critical Account (original) (raw)

Rolf Petri, A Short History of Western Ideology: A Critical Account

European History Quarterly, 2018

the Italians had about the 'new America' (157). Adding to this confusion were the conflicting aims of administrators regarding the status of native inhabitants, a fact which left many Italian settlers with a degree of uncertainty regarding their neighbours. Pergher's book presents a convincing argument for the innovative nature of Fascist settlement policy and constitutes a valuable contribution to the growing scholarly interest in daily life under the Fascist regime. Pergher skilfully demonstrates the negotiation between the expectations of settlers and administrators, and presents a nuanced and complex analysis of Fascism's policies on the borderlands. Carefully constructed, Pergher's argument at times labours the point and does not always present sufficient evidence; however, she is successful in presenting a complex picture of the 'common sense' that was operative in the world of settlers and administrators.

How the West Was Lost: The Decline of a Myth and the Search for New Stories

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020

The notion that the West is in decline is not new but remains topical. It is the backdrop of disappointment in the vaunted post-Cold War "Peace Dividend," the shock of 9/11, and the trajectories of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Western decline is also marked by the failure to absorb Russia in the Western-defined "international community" and the emergence of China as a fullthroated rival to liberal institutionalist teleology and Western economic superiority. Whistlers past the graveyard cobble together statistics and logic to defend what Thomas Kuhn 1 might identify as the normal science of the tattered Western-centered multiculturalist paradigm. Nevertheless, everything from Brexit to Trump, structural inequality and racism, and, of course, Covid-19 management problems raises the question as to whether the era of Western dominance and normative hegemony is done. Ben Ryan captures the story of norms and narratives behind the idea of the West and its laments, but his book does not tackle issues of power and exploitation. Ryan's analysis thus exhibits a limited understanding of the historical depth and implications of the diachronic tectonics of Western decline. Ryan notes that the West became "the West" in the nineteenth century (5) and cites the importance of that era's discipline of anthropology as helping to differentiate the supposedly enlightened European mind from "backwards or decadent alternatives." For Ryan, the "West" is a "purely intellectual construct" (3) or-in Benedict Anderson's famous phrase-an imagined community. He says it is defined by three connected ideas developed through a "distinctively Christian, Enlightenment, European intellectual prism." These encompass the dream of a moral endpoint and inevitable progress toward it, linked slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity-which he calls the Republican (Ryan uses the upper case here) values of the Enlightenment, and Universalism, which he defines as the belief Western norms could be fostered in any part of the world (6-7). Ryan does well to capture the teleological bedrock of Western self-celebration, but he might have considered the overlapping programs for completing the Enlightenment offered by John Rawls (via law and legal institutions) and Jürgen Habermas (effective legal and affective engagement in the Agora)-Ryan does briefly cite Habermas on "constitutional patriotism" (244). After his conceptual introduction, Ryan identifies much of "what's been lost" in the West as involving faith and religion. He clearly feels strongly that the loss of faith and decline of Christian Democracy mark a real crisis of values. Given the stress he puts on this aspect of Western decline, it is surprising that his analysis of religiosity and secularity in the Western world does not appear to benefit from Charles Taylor's 2 much richer and historically anchored assessment of these issues. Taylor, like Habermas, merits only a passing mention in his book (256). Ryan also might have taken a look at James Turner's assessment of religious unbelief in America. 3 Ryan's focus on religiosity may be a reason he appears unaware of or uninterested in central, secular elements of Western-ness. First, the West is not just a set of republican and French revolutionary ideas. Not all the European powers then involved in developing the West were republics-and even the sortof constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom had a fraught relationship with the Enlightenment as an idea or blueprint for governance and norm-based behavior. The anthropology Ryan cites helped rationalize what monarchical and republican Europeans believed was the superior development-or simply the superiority-of the Western subject compared to the not-Western other. This problem is deepened by Ryan's neglect of the distinction between the West as a whole and the various governments, intellectual constructs, security and economic policies, and imperial/postimperial programs of states falling under the term's conceptual umbrella.

The Particular Universal: Europe in Modern Philosophies of History

Europe is understood most often in terms of a geographical, cultural, historical or a political-economic entity. This article aims at rediscovering the philosophical sense of this notion by situating it into the modern tradition of the philosophy of history. Through this tradition, Europe became one of the central platforms in which the historical framework was put to the test – where the ideas of progress and decline acquired their concrete character. Most importantly, Europe became the central platform for the idea of universalism as the gradual dissolution of cultural limits and the triumph of an egalitarian community of human beings. Instead of simply acting as the sole representative of this universality, I argue, Europe became the mediator between the particular and the universal – it was the answer to the question, to which extent can a particular being represent an idea of universal reason, freedom or cosmopolitanism. Following this line of interpretation on the basis of Husserlian phenomenology, I argue that if Europe is to be conceived of in terms of a philosophical idea, it should not be conceived of as a metaphysical essence but as a dynamic process of temporal development.

Preface to The Discipline of Western Supremacy

This volume concludes the trilogy in which I redefine world politics as an evolving composite of modes of foreign relations. Foreign relations are about communities occupying separate social spaces and considering each other as outsiders. Occupation, its protection, and the regulation of exchange with others are universal attributes of human communities; they date back to the dawn of anthropogenesis and have evolved with the ongoing transformation of nature. Hence, as we have seen in Volume II, all human groups, communities and societies rely on mythologies and religious imaginaries to make sense of the foreign encounter. They originate in the tribal and empire/nomad modes and continue to run through contemporary foreign relations. Indeed in our contemporary epoch, such primordial imaginaries are resurgent on a grand scale.