The West seen from the East

This article explores the transformation of the directional concept "the west" into the socio-political concept "the West". From the early 19th century onward, the concept of the West became temporalized and politicized. It became a concept of the future ("Zukunftsbegriff"), acquired a polemical thrust through the polarized opposition to antonyms such as "Russia", "the East", and "the Orient", and was deployed as a tool for forging national identities. The gestation of "the West" went hand-in-hand with the gradual substitution of an east-west divide for the north-south divide that had dominated European mental maps for centuries.

2004

The rise of the West in the context of Spengler’s “world-history” should not only confer the title of great benefactor to one source or civilization rather to all parts of the grand macrocosm of history. While western civilization and the idea of European history can be associated with huge steps in technological innovation and maritime expansion of territory, historians must not discount the fact that other civilizations especially those in the Eurasian continents and Africa have also played a role in the institutionalization of what we now recognize as world history or the modern world.

An exercise in hermeneutical suspicion, this article engages the extent to which the burgeoning appearance of ostensibly Eastern concepts and practices within everyday late-modern discourse and practice can actually be said to represent a thoroughgoing ‘Easternization’ of Western culture. Using insights from Pierre Bourdieu, this article argues that Eastern themes have been appropriated by successive generations in the West relative to a range of hermeneutical dynamics, most relevant of which are technologized conceptualizations of the self, a depersonalized view of the cosmos and the metaphorization of the modern cultural field. Holding that appropriated Eastern concepts and practices have been tailored to the contours of the Western habitus, the article concludes that what we have is more of a westernization of eastern themes than an Easternization of the western paradigm. The hermeneutics of suspicion detailed in the article thereby raises doubts concerning the extent to which purportedly eastern-looking ‘counter cultural’ movements such as theosophy, the new age and contemporary mysticisms/spiritualities actually run ‘counter’ to the Western culture they purport to reject.

Focusing chiefly on the period from the 18th Century to the present, this course analyzes the most significant political, social, intellectual and economic trends that have shaped contemporary societies. HH216 examines the global impact of European and American cultures over the past three centuries and explores the most important reactions to modernity in both Western and non-Western societies. In doing so, the course situates the West in a global context and prepares students to think critically and comparatively about a changing world.

This is the first in a series of papers attempting to define the ideological concept of the so-called "West". It examines the historical roots of postmodern humanism, the emergence of a socio-cultural "ressentiment" within the "Western world", and the consequences of such intra-conflictual symptoms.

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.

Uses of the West. Security and the Politics of Order, 2017