Can we still defend the West? Conservatives and progressives are both wrong

When I began teaching at King’s College London in 2018, I enthusiastically took over the second-year module “The History of Political Thought”. Enrollment was strong, and student feedback positive. But one thing kept cropping up. A persistent minority of undergraduates complained that we only covered Western political thought. But surely the history of political thought should include non-Western thinkers, too?

This was an entirely reasonable matter to raise. After all, political thought has taken place across all human cultures, throughout history, around the globe (although by no means all of it has been written down in a way accessible to undergraduates). Nonetheless, as regards teaching, it presented a challenge.

I had made the conscious decision to combine breadth with depth. Rather than racing through the great works of 10 “canonical” thinkers, I elected instead to do two weeks on each of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx, with a bonus week on Mary Wollstonecraft squeezed in. The aim was pedagogical. For many students this would be their first and last time coming into sustained contact with some of the greatest works of political philosophy ever written. Deciding on a list of six was always going to be somewhat arbitrary. (No Plato! No Augustine! No David Hume or Adam Smith or Max Weber!) But in picking these six, I wanted to introduce undergraduates to just how powerful political thought can be when practiced by the best. Also, I felt duty bound to keep the flame alive.

Also, it seemed not inappropriate to privilege Western political thought. After all, it is a brute fact that the Western state form has come to dominate the rest of the world, being now universally encountered wherever there are states. China, Russia or India may conceive of themselves as in geopolitical opposition to the West. But their bureaucratically managed governmental organizations, displaying a monopoly over the legitimate uses of violence within their territories, are adoptions of the originally Western form of state organization. If you want to understand modern politics, not just in the West but across the whole world, then you need to understand Western political thinking. The great texts of that tradition are, therefore, a good place to start. And that remains true even if you ultimately want to oppose Western politics, perhaps because of concerns arising from the very real legacies of brutality, exploitation, and injustice that the histories of Western states are undeniably bound up with.

Looking back, I should have made this kind of case more explicitly to my students. (In fact, I did, whenever any of them bothered to ask me about it in person. But typically, the ones who bothered were not the ones driving complaints.) However it was the period of peak awokening, and I didn’t fancy a public fight. So, acting out of cowardice, I tried to fob off the complainers by simply renaming the module “The History of Western Political Thought”.

That worked about as effectively as you might imagine, and it shows how naïve I was to think it would make any difference. The complaints kept coming, increasingly under the banner of demands that we “decolonize the curriculum”. Which always struck me as odd, with its implication that the curriculum had first been colonized. By who exactly, and how? Well, a good way to answer that would be to read the most insightful people who thought and wrote about such things…

For the most part I hunkered down and tried to ignore the noise, concentrating on teaching the students who wanted to be taught. Happily, that was the vast majority of them. Indeed, one of my most satisfying moments as a teacher came when a student stopped by my office hours one year, toward the end of the course. He had initially been a vocal proponent of “decolonize the curriculum”. But he said that he had really enjoyed engaging with the module, and was increasingly skeptical about “decolonizing” reading lists. Specifically, that he appreciated how much the thinkers I had assigned disagreed with each other, in particular about the roles of class and hierarchy. As he put it, it didn’t matter if they were dead white men: what mattered was diversity of thought. (For those who care about such things, they might be interested to learn that the student was himself black.)

Still, I felt grubby having renamed the module “Western political thought”. After all, this was straightforwardly inaccurate. Indeed, it was (ironically enough) an instance of cultural appropriation. I spent the first two weeks requiring students to read Aristotle’s immensely challenging The Politics — and yet I knew damned well that claiming Aristotle for Western political thought was at the very least intellectually suspicious. Not only did the idea of “the West” simply not exist in the fourth century BCE, when Aristotle wrote, but he would have been appalled by the suggestion that he was part of any such grouping. According to Aristotle, people to the geographic west of Greece were barbarians, incapable of proper political living — hence why none of them lived in city states, a prerequisite for properly functioning political animals to achieve natural flourishing. Retrospectively claiming Aristotle for the West was to surreptitiously trade on his genius to burnish the credentials of an idea that came much later, yet which he would have wanted no part of. Not to mention the fact that Arab Muslim scholars were making extensive use of Aristotle around the time European Christians were scratching around in Dark Age mud.

Well, if I felt grubby back then, Georgios Varouxakis’ new book The West: The History of an Idea has left me feeling positively filthy (in the best possible way). This is because he brings home just how complicated the history of “the West” really is, but also how much of that history has now been forgotten, its meaning constantly changing in the wake of successive political battles. Recent salvos in the culture wars about how “we” ought properly to appraise “our” history are merely the latest installment in a long series of fights.

Varouxakis demolishes two leading narratives around “the West”. The first (typically “conservative”) proudly claims that “we” in the West can trace our heritage back, via an unbroken pedigree, to the glory of the ancient world: the Romans, and especially the Greeks, themselves originators of civilization itself, and to which we are the heirs. (This is the style of thinking underpinning, for example, Boris Johnson’s recent lecture at Liberty University on the importance of defending Western values). The second (typically “progressive”, and self-consciously opposed to the first) says something like the opposite: that “the West” was an idea invented in the 1890s to justify British imperial expansionism, and thus provide spurious legitimation for colonial domination, expropriation, and violence (and should be ditched accordingly). (This is the line put forward, for example, by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his high-profile book The Lies That Bind.)

Both these stories are wrong. It is true that widespread use of “the West” did not emerge until the 19th century. (Prior to this, the main distinction preoccupying political thinkers was between North and South, i.e. the difference between powerful European monarchies and the apparently unrelated ancient politics of the Mediterranean.) It came, however, around 50 years earlier than the 1890s, and not because of the activities of the British, but thanks to the innovations of the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who used it to advocate something like the opposite of colonial domination, envisioning a federation of free republics committed to citizen equality.

But “the West” as opposed to what? Well, “the East”. But what was that? With the brief exception of the early 1940s, since Comte it has mostly meant Russia — the de facto leader of a “Slavic” alternative, long perceived as a threat (militarily, culturally, spiritually) to Europeans located to the geographic west.

Not that it has been a simple story of “us” versus “them”. Where did the Germans fit in? Including them as part of “the West” threatened to displace the centrality of France to this European grouping — and that was even before two World Wars in which Teutonic supremacy was attempted. Still, since about 1945, most have been happy to include them. Similarly, Japan was recruited as a “Western” Soviet antagonist until the early Nineties, when its threat to American economic dominance after the end of the Cold War meant it was pushed out of the club.

The point of tracing these (constantly contested) evolutions of the idea of “the West”, Varouxakis shows, is not to assert one “true” definition. For there is no one “true” definition of the West. The idea comes down to us through multiple generations of political disagreement, with prevailing understandings changing depending on different political, economic, military and cultural pressures.

Which is by no means to say that the idea of “the West”, is somehow empty, unreal, or meaningless. It does pick out a shared history of political forms, cultural developments, military arrangements, and much else besides. Right now, the citizens of Ukraine are understandably grateful for the continuing idea of “the West”, into which they have only recently been inducted. Similarly, the Taiwanese have good reason to hope that Western nations take an interest in supporting ideologically friendly regimes not just in the geographic west, but as far away as China’s backyard. And there is surely something important in insisting that Western values go deeper than just consumer culture and light entertainment. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may recently have brought stand-up comedy to Riyadh, but nobody is under any illusion that he is somehow also inviting in our values. Quite the opposite — as victims of Saudi torture and imprisonment might attest.

Furthermore, there is a family of political ideas that has originated in the West, and which we have good reason to try and hold on to — and that Varouxakis does not shy away from supporting. Liberal democracy comes with constitutional guarantees about what can and cannot be done to individuals and minorities. It operates according to the rule of law, and delivers (albeit imperfectly) meaningful freedom to citizens. It upholds values like meritocracy, religious toleration, freedom of sexuality, and many more besides. As Varouxakis puts it: “to my mind [these are] to be preferred, and we should defend them against alarming alternatives.” Indeed. One wonders if those decrying the evils of “the West” from within the safe cloisters of academia have fully thought through what the available alternatives entail.

Varouxakis, of course, admits that the West “may have immense failings and much to answer for”. But, he adds, “it is in terms of its own register of normative principles and values that it is found wanting in practice—not according to any impartial comparative universal standard”. More generally, what makes Western values valuable is not that they are Western, but that if applied properly and by their own logic, then they apply equally to everyone. Not because people are (or are not) “Westerners”, but because they are human beings. To be sure, the societies of the West have frequently failed, in practice, to live up to such a lofty goal. But the appropriate response is to try and make them do so in future — not to denounce the goal as somehow not worth having.

Yes, this is a Western idea. But it is a good one that we should be proud of. One place where the legacy of such an idea can be continued is in the university classroom, and in the service of which Varouxakis provides a most valuable resource. More generally, I am happy to report that the specter of the close-minded, AI-dependent, woke Gen-Z zombie is grossly exaggerated. The vast majority of my students want to learn, and are prepared to read difficult historical texts accordingly. The thinkers I assign to them are one way of introducing the complicated story of how the complex, contested ideas underpinning the West came about. It turns out that the revised module title was appropriate, after all.

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